Google's Matthew Glotzbach speaks in Toronto

I had the pleasure of hearing a talk by Google's Matthew Glotzbach at the IT 360 Trade Show in Toronto on April 9, 2008. Glotzbach gave an informative talk on the current and near-future trends he sees in Google's enterprise software.

He prefaced his talk by saying that what's happening in computing is similar to what happened with electric power generation. At one time, companies produced their own electricity. Then, the power company started producing electricity on a grid and individual companies gave up producing their own electricity and plugged into the grid which provided relatively cheap energy. Glotzbach posits that a similar thing may happen in computing where individual end-users no longer provide their own hardware and software but rather plug into an existing grid.

What follows is not a summary of what Glotzbach said, but rather a brief outline of the way some of the things he said affected my views of the Internet.

First, the Internet has democratized the way information is distributed and created. The likes of Wikipedia and the proliferation of bloggs suggest this democratization.

Second, simplicity in the architecture of the Internet is leading the way in applications. The simplest applications, such as RSS feeds take root because they are the easiest for people to use and they are interoperable.

Third, translation functions are growing on the Internet. Google's chat function, for instance, offers "3rd party" machine translation of on-line chat conversations. If you want to talk to someone in China, the function can translate your English to Mandarin as you converse on-line.

Fourth, demand for expanded storage is in the market. In short, people want it. One reason why they want it is to save and be able recall rich media such as video and because they want to save their emails in searchable archives. He noted that at Google, the costs of providing expanded memory to customers has been progressively declining. Glotzbach further suggested that individuals and businesses could benefit from declining cost curves by riding them down with their service providers.

Interestingly, it appears that energy costs are now a major driver in the provision of computing services. Key to his company's ability to provide lower storage costs will be its ability to keep energy costs as low as possible.

With the decreasing costs of storage, it now makes sense for companies to outsource their storage needs.

Fifth, I found it interesting how Glotzbach referred to the web page as "real estate." Clearly, the analogy to my mind, is a good one. In a world where one's location on the Internet is critical to connecting with customers and placing oneself within the fast flow of a particular market niche or newly-created niche, "real estate" continues to be driven by the old realtor's adage: location, location, location.

Indeed, the digital world is an analog to the physical world. Business goals are now being achieved more and more by teams that collaborate within and across companies. IT, therefore, is more useful when it assists teams in communicating across the traditional information silos of their companies.

Sixth, consumers are now the ones who are driving IT innovations. It used to be that all the best technology and most useful applications first showed up in the work environment. Now, individual consumers are getting technlogy that they want to apply in the work environment. Barriers to adoption of new technology also seem to be falling away.

I may have also understood that 71% of the business of the Internet is applications.

To learn more about the analogy of the growing computer grid to the development of the power grid, Glotzbach recommended the book by Nicolas Carr called The Big Switch.