The Google galaxy

I m Dan Farber, editor-in-chief at ZDNet and today I want to talk about the obsession with Google with the stock price rising over $400 and every body talking about it every where. In fact, you can t go to a conference or have a conversation with anyone without talking about what I m calling the Google Galaxy. By Galaxy, I ve pre-drawn some of it here. It s to really look at what Google has today and try to determine where they re headed and see if that obsession is really justified.

Let me start with search because that s really the foundation of everything. To organize the world s information and search at the center and that s how they got started with their page rank algorithm. And obviously, they re working hard to keep up with and stay ahead of Yahoo and Microsoft and others who want to play in this game that s centered around search and very importantly, monetizing search through ads.

There s a lot more to the story. For example, you have desktop search so that extends from the web into the hard disks of the universe. You have this new piece that Google came out with, Google base, which looks like it s a competitor to eBay, to classified ads, Craig s List. We really don t know at this point but I think people can look at the seed of it and say, Here s a big XML storage database, what could they do with it? Even Microsoft has picked up on this and has a stealth project called Fremont working on the same kind of idea.

Recently, they introduced this notion of analyze where you can analyze your stats from your website using this service from Google. Now, I think you can extend that idea out and say, If they can analyze stats like that, what s so hard about doing something like an application for CRM? Not that far off if they really want to do it and get into that business. Now, of course, they have their automated news, video, they re into Wi-Fi. In other words, they re bankrolling Wi-Fi in certain cities around the country. Why would they want to do that? Well, they re going to have more people going to their search pages, using their kinds of services and therefore, they can connect Wi-Fi to advertising.

Add G Talk. G Talk could morph into a more substantial Voice Over IP service like others have such as Skype and we don t know exactly where they re headed with it but it seems like that s an obvious direction especially considering that they re connecting up to Wi-Fi, that they are buying all this dark fiber and I ll put the dark fiber under here. What the dark fiber means is that they re trying to provide — and maybe they ll stick those data centers around some of those points which would mean they could deliver content faster to users, they could be more at the center. Not just of what people are doing on their browser but of the infrastructure as well because one thing we do know is that Google knows how to scale low cost infrastructure based mostly on Linux and Intel or X 86 based hardware.

We ve heard about the controversy about books, digitizing all the books. Maps and local, very important area because that s where you can take maps, local, Froogle which is their shopping service, and connect all those up and then you connect all those back to ads and whoa, what if Google did a wallet like a Pay Pal? Then you connect that to Froogle and you connect that to local and maps and you connect it to ads and you connect it even to their blogger where they ve got a service like others. You can even connect it to GMail. Who says you couldn t buy something through your mail account? They don t have a calendar yet but they re rumored to be having a calendar so it is almost endless.

Even from Google, you can extend out and say what about Groups? They have Groups. Okay, what about social networking? The notion of social networking, bringing Groups together. How about people who shop in groups and get group discounts and how about connecting groups into ads. It s just an endless mash up. The issue here is that what Google has is a great mash up of technology that s based purely on having the Internet available which is unlike where Microsoft is at and now is really trying to compete in this space.

I have one last word which is all of this is beta, meaning it s still a grand experiment and yet, you can see all the value that s been generated by Google and others in this space. So it is obviously far more than just an obsession. It s far more than just beta but yet, when you think about it in the long term, we re still in very much the beta, in fact, perhaps the alpha stage of this formation of a galaxy that s Internet based.