Google An Information Revolution

What will happen when tons of software programs, “offices”, “windows” and pack the necessary licenses to them will never be needed to the user.

Most i like about Google that it was created by two graduate students at Stanford University, Brin and Page. Graduate students came up with the search machine for the local university network, as a result have created a digital corporation that bites off pieces of meat have cowered Microsoft’a and shove themselves with China. Yes, it is this: when the Chinese security forces have recently been hacked mailboxes dissidents to Gmail, Google growled, Celestial poked in the side and introduced E-mail Encryption for all customers. And I am now, writing this text in Google Docs, I see in the address bar of my browser nice, uninvited guest! Figure you go! And illustrations will break!

Google is not just developing new software. Google creates a new habitat. It seems as impossible as to create a new Earth with the new law of gravitation and a new atmosphere. But they do it!

At all times – since the patriarch Peter Norton and the progenitor of Bill Gates – it was believed that the computer should be the program. Many programs. Without them, the computer – a dead iron. Bill Gates of this simple premise has made a vast fortune. And not alone. He was followed in orderly rows on the road march of business rolled numerous creators of digital office and miraculous photoshop, sellers enormous risovalok and compact translator. For the philosopher, who scrutinizes the microscope the planet Earth, no matter you are buying this program or take them from the pirates, it is only important that you install them on your computer. The computer program as a warehouse. The computer as a tool ownership programs.

Making money on ideas – this is not the same thing, that little potentates sitting on the necks of the working steel mill or a greedy monster bite off chunks of state property. Brin and Page, as poets, pondered on associations. They taught their search engine to sell advertising associated with inquiries. It is unlikely that a search engine than Google in the associative thinking of the poet Boris Poplavskiy, who died in poverty, or the writer Edgar Allan Poe, whom ever was not enough for a bottle – but she does not know tiredness, does not irritate to the idiots and also immortal. Search engine Google handles 41 billion 345 million queries per month – and for each request (and also under each that you receive in Gmail e-mail) for the association is looking for advertising. Routine millionaire after such success would have bought a house in London – and thought it would be a vital problem solved. But these two, having acquired an unprecedented financial power, have engaged in the most exciting thing in the world: the creation of its own world.

In the world of Google on his computer a person needs just one program. That it is now grown on the fertile pastures of digital in California, where the head office of the company. This centaur with the head of browser and operating system body named Chrome – the only program that should be on a user’s computer is constantly connected to the web. More nothing. All the rest as needed free of charge to the Internet. All work takes place on the web. And the work is also stored in the web.

The ideas are not implemented in the form in which come to mind. The idea of communism, wander and seething in the minds of Marx and Lenin, is realized by two billionaires, who create a free digital world, strangely reminiscent of the Soviet utopia fiction novel. In their world of digital wealth – the software for all occasions – loaded at a time when it is needed. Ownership is not required. Programs are no longer the property and become the air that belongs to all.

Pieces of the new world are already working. Today, you can not have a computer word processor and write in Google Docs; after that comes a long series of already existing free services: Google Earth, Google Translate, notebook Google, Calendar Google, Google Alerts, Google Wave (beta) and so on.

These services known to many. But in a free world, and Google has a mysterious corners, known only to Captain Cook and network digital commander Bering. In the far corner of the world is hidden service Google Fights, where you can arrange fights between words in a fraction of minutes to determine the frequency of their world (three minutes ago, abstracted from the text, I made a battle between the words “love” and “hatred”, with a score 122 000 000:116 000 000 won love). And in a hut on the far river live service Google Sets, which is given to several subjects defines the next. I often talk to him – the part is like a conversation of two lunatics pakuyuschih suitcases before leaving for Kilimanjaro …

Why Google has created such strange language services, what they sense and what lies behind them plan – ask Brin.

I do not believe that all this construction is done spontaneously, by chance and without a plan. I do not believe that this whole mega-project, which includes dozens of free services and its own operating system, built on quicksand momentary commerce, rather than on solid rock philosophy. I think in some kind of underground storage is a huge safe, and in it another, but in the matryoshka doll, but it is another, and now at the bottom of that, the last doll, which the boy Sergey Brin once brought from the USSR, is magic needle, an injection which will make all our material, the thing the world tremble with fear, hover and disappear. Matter is not needed, rather, it does not need so many depressing. The matter should not obstruct a life cases should not obscure the window, steaks should not ooze blood from the heavens, and giant warehouses of all kinds of junk should not burden the bucolic landscapes of Arcadia. The matter must be removed from the world-loaded into it only on demand and need, as a loaded program in the world created by Google.

This is already happening. We do not own the water, we have loads it as needed. We do not own light, we load it as needed. True, it costs money, but I see the utility bills each month falling in the mailbox, just as an annoying bug in the design of the universe. It is removable. Chubais would cost to go to the students to Sergey Brin and Larry Page, to understand how to make service free of charge. I think it would be enough to two weeks to learn how ridiculous and antediluvian all these schemes to enrich the rich, which he calls the “privatization”. If he does not, then soon we will have to pay three rubles and eighty-seven cents for each nanoparticle and, moreover, to hear stories about that for Fantik of sweets “Ladybird” to all of us in heaven after death, will at the car “Volga”.

Google casts doubt not some individual things, and now in its entirety. What will Microsoft do with a hundred tons of their windows after the end of this year in our computers (especially in netbooks) glide easy and fast Chrome? What will make paper publishing after Google Digitize all the books on Earth? Google becomes the key word era, and the word is ringing and sounds on every corner. I have participated in online conversations, where people in the heat of the moment talking to each other: “Google with you!” – “Gaffer, so you Google the brain!” – “Yes, Google round!” – “Yes, Google bison!”

Everything happens very quickly. Two days ago, Bill Gates, the high-tech field marshal, prancing in front of all the white light on a horse named Office, yesterday we were happy because the free software frees us from having to buy the program, and now Google is holding in the palm of crystal ball, transmitting a picture of the future, in which the property No, an environment for our life and work is created on the Internet, and the matter only sometimes loaded in the spirit world magic button by pressing Enter.

Alex Polikovsky
translated from russian