As a blogwrite, I could sit in summary over the past year or I could pontificate on the clickworthiness of countless threads of trends, I could even speculate on our upcoming election, if it mattered, but no, I think it's a lot more fun to second guess what Larry Page is going to say in Vegas this Friday at 4 ...

Rumours say that Google is about to launch a dumb, network based computer called the Google Cube. The Google Cube will be a cheap, small box that needs to be connected to a server to be fully working - and that is probably why Google has been purchasing all that dark fiber for almost a year now.
[ The Google Cube ]

I'll take that out a bit further. I think Larry will say the Google Cube will be the last computer you'll ever buy, and if their crack gooO/S engineers are worth their salt, I think there's a slim chance he could be right. Here's why ...

The Last Computer You'll Ever Buy

I was going to mock this up last year, but never got around to it: I pictured a homemaker standing next to their bookcase in the style of those googie-era Life Magazine ads, just sliding in yet another identical white box with three lights and one button on it, not yet completing a rack of maybe two dozen clones. The caption would read, "The Last Computer You'll Ever Buy" and the implication would be that this latest no-name whitebox chassis was being folded into the household Beowulf supercomputer, upping the total family computing power by that X amount of megaFLOPS. In the background, kids watch cartoons on TV, teens bop to the latest, the spouse reads news, and they all glance back to note today's bump up in performance.

That was the ad. Gone are Apple vs Windows vs Linux vs BEOS vs PICT or whatever, there's just you, your personal abstract and geographically indiscriminate computing space, and various sorts of terminals, from pocket sized to home theatre, each of them simply windows into the larger whole, simply accessories as in "accessory to the crime" and totally interchangeable. Email on the TV, web on the phone, TV on the lap tablet, telephone in the hall, everywhere all at once one and the same tailored by and to the means of access.

Here's my second-guess on Larry: I think he's realized an essential truth that I overlooked: our homemaker does not want more boxes in the house. Computers are ugly, noisy, drive up the hydro bill, and we all know all too well what a jealous god these blasted things are, soaking up every moment not being spent in essentials like toilet and sleep. Hands up all those who've had a sandwich at the terminal, and be honest now.

Regardless how gumdrop dressy you paint it, the last thing in the world the regular everyday people want in their lives is a chunk of ill-planned virus-infested technology that's going to sit in the corner whining for upgrade patch and filesweep attention seven by twenty-four. Larry knows this. Larry also knows that he's sitting on conceivably the largest and most stable supercomputing platform in the history of ICT, and we all know he's not afraid to use it.

Summing the Google Equation

Yeah, I know, been there, done that, and no one has a Corel "I used web-app WordPerfect" T-shirts, absolutely no-one, not even whatshisname's trendy dressed wife. But think about it for a sec, step back, and let's just tally up what Google already has tucked in their belt ...

1. One (1) massive supercomputer, composed of low-cost commodity-computing components and strung together with a secret sauce that makes it damn near bullet proof. Other than downtime for The Dance, anyone here remember a moment in time when Google was down? How about a moment longer than a pee break?

2. Oodles and oodles of dark fibre stretching all over the place. Dark fibre means there's no signal on it yet, no ISP partner, no government to appease, this is like if Google owned your internet access they way the hydro companies own your wall sockets.

3. Of course fibre to the home may be cool to have for a lot of apps like Hi-Def VoIP and video renderfarms, but for today's practical home-computing purposes, there's really no need for Google to own your wall sockets just yet, and besides, that would most certainly upset too many potential ISP partners. So instead let's ponder this what if, and dig this, just think about it, what if all that dark fibre was to compose the backbone of the geographically distributed nodes of the Google Supercomputer? Instead of offering every service everywhere from one well-ventilated war-room in Cupertino, film-edit wares might migrate out to the edges of the network near Hollywood, Hongkong, Bombay and Toronto, farm apps anneal to the Breadbasket, Grab-a-Cab gets cloned in London, Paris and NYC and the supercomputing takes an organic shape that optimizes the actual patterns of its use.

4. In-house here at the Digital Cosy Cottage, I have recently restarted my adventures into the VNC way of living online. Instead of looking at the Internet Computer as a web-browser with all it's faults and foibles of horrific human interaction design, VNC is just a facade, it's a frame by frame movie showing the desktop out there somewhere on the 'real' computer, and returning the space-time locations of pointer clicks and key events.

   And it's fab. With VNC, my tired old laptop is a speedy desktop that can run all my fave apps, even run OOo along side Firefox along side Emacs, a scenario that would choke the actual box underneath the virtual screen. What's more, if the laptop battery craps out, no matter, find the power, turn on, tune in and resume right where it was. It works from my laptop, from May's computer, it even works (almost) from my phone and most certainly would work just peachy from something like a Treo or a PSP.

   

   The only problem I have with VNC is audio -- I live for audio, computing without audio for me is like a Kubrick film without the soundtrack, and VNC has no intrinsic audio solution, and Linux Net Audio is just too unsupported to be anything more than a curio and a teaser of possibilities.

   So I never built my version of that Last Computer You'll Ever Own, I was left to only dream of it. Google, on the other hand, was not constrained by time or by money or by the available talent to solve exactly that problem of an integrated multi-media experience deliverable to an absurdly thin client platform.

5. Maybe most essential of ingredients of all, Google is no friend to all those other IT companies out there running their ceaseless pissing contests of mine is bigger, better, faster, cheaper and more exclusive than yours, so they don't have to worry about that classic Application Service Provider problem, "How do you plan to support Application X?"

   Google, as we shall see in a moment, can just lean back smug and confident and say, "We don't."

Where do you want to be?

Ok, so that's the Google side of the equation, and it adds up pretty comprehensively without having to stretch anything beyond what we already know is affordable, feasible and desirable. Now let's look at the other side of the fence: How do we really use computers?

And here's where it all falls into place ...

• Email: One of the constant stats of the Internet from the very beginnings of the public-access 'net to this present modern enlightened spam-laden day is how a whopping two thirds of all packets are email packets. Sure there's those who think Email is doomed, but for reasons I've already written about, I think you're almost certain to find such nay-sayers have deep connections to Microsoft. Email is the core of what we use the network to do, and will you look at that?

  By golly, Google just happens to have a darn fine full-service email solution that runs on GooOS!

• Social computing, the stuff of forums, mailing lists, blogging, datings and ratings and what's hip where and where can I buy it that taps all that Mark Federman was saying a couple of posts ago about the Way of the Modern Consumer and, hey what th--

  Yup, Google has one of those too. A couple of them in fact. First rate, well-planned, solid reliable and well received.

• File sharing ... ah yes, good old file sharing, but dig, remember how massively parallel computers work in the first place! What need to we have for p2p applications when all our files already reside on the same machine!

  And just think of the opportunities that gives, for new content distribution (just drop it in here Mr Sony) and for market research tracking (oh, look, these orkut groups, those blogs and the file has shifted off to reside in the west-coast physical file storage ...)

• Rich media delivery is finally in the domain of the P2P, only instead of some ad-hoc add-on, the swarmcasting is intrinsic to the device, boosted in the core design of the optically tied GoogleBox hypercube nodes, and nothing more than just the way things get done.

• Games? Games are just another app, perfectly amiable to rendering in that VNC frame of a stream of inbound screen frames and stream of outbound pointer/key events. And just think of the games possible when it's not just you on your playstation with an ethernet trickling your position to and fro, but a really heavyweight supercomputing platform top to bottom.

  Can you say Photo-realistic Rendering in Real-time? I knew you could. The gaming industry will never recover. No more alternate versions for every pansied O/S, no more aching for consumers to catch up and upgrade, and best of all, and I suppose this goes for file-trades too, absolutely no possibility of bootleg resales.

  None, nada. Because there is no 'copy', there is only the Google Machine and a bunch of on there now subscribers.

• VoIP? Just another instance of file-sharing really. Your voice-recorded phrase is just a file, the listener is just hearing a real-time playback. Dead simple. No messing with moving things about a network, because, to rephrase the old Sun Microsystems saw but inside-out, The network is the computer

  Nifty re-frame there. Pretty darn cool I say.

• Media authoring -- here's something that might take some doing since we here collide with the classical bug-a-boo of the notorious Last Mile; it is now and will be for a long time yet very expensive to move bits in and out of the personal space. Virtual Network Computing solves the interaction with that mega-featured lightening fast movie editing system at your disposal, but there is still a very real problem of how to get that 9 gigabytes of raw digital footage out of your handicam and up on to that geographically nearest GoogleBox tapped into the above mentioned dark-fibre backbone.

  It's a problem, let's hope it has a solution, and really, I'll wager for the vast majority of our Life Magazine advert families, that $100 direct-to-DVD recorder box from Wal-Mart will do them just fine for capturing those precious moments.

Colossus, the Google Project

You see, the big difference here is that we are talking about the home computing environment. Snap! there goes the monopoly control points. No further need for 'Word' or 'Excel' compatibility, no need for Powerpoint, no need for iTunes even. Nada. Non consequential. There is only you and me and the need of each everyday person for everyday things like connecting with friends and sharing interests.

The Big Boys of ICT all went after the Holy Grail of the office market, trying to get a finger in everyone's revenue-generation pie by insinuating themselves into the specific subscriber devices and then walling off the competition to stake and conquer their computing-market share. That was the old model, the model of The Box; within the sum total space manifold of a grand unified Hyper Google Cube, there is only this one box, one massively parallel omni-connectable widely distributed optically backboned super-pie. Want to be the dominant home-market word-processing platform? The dominant game? All of a sudden there's only one machine, one platform worthy of your attention, and as platforms go, it's a beaut, a software engineer's wet dream. And yet, to all the people using that tract of sexy code, it's just another hyper-dimensional destination online.

A total round about recapitulation to those ancient days of timeshares on the mainframes, here now re-invented anew for a modern age. Toss the box, and get in with the cube! The bother and fuss is gone, nothing to 'admin', nothing to install, nothing to trip over in compatibilities, nothing more you have to buy or replace, ever. No upgrades or patches because that's all under the hood now, over the fence in Google's lap, where it should be, as sublimely out of mind invisible as last-century's long-distance dry-reed relay. Who wouldn't rather be computing this way?

I could go on, I suppose. How about a new advert, this time start on a closeup, a small cubic box on the shelf by the kids and their TV cartoons, zoom out in a spiral, teens bop by another cube, yet another by the sofa laptablet newsreader, our spiral back path shatters out the window, the shattered barriers between living spaces flutter out like clouds of butterflies and all the the cubes across the landscape pulse and glow in time and the soundtrack blares Mick Jagger, "And the walls come tumblin' down, the walls come tumblin' tumbling tumblin' ..."

Years ago I painted a scenario for VNC computing for the publisher at Macmillan, and Mike said he had his epiphany when I said how I could go into the lobby of the hotel and ask the desk clerk for a PDA and turn it on, sign in and voila I'd be there at my own desktop indistinguishable from using my own personal hardware device.

Good Morning Mr G.
Welcome to the Google HyperCube
where everything is here and now.
Where do you want to be today?
#> __

It's After the End of the World

Wow. If this is what Larry has planned, oo la la. Some ride. The end of Microsoft. The end of Apple. The end of DRM. Why? Because all three of them are simply 'obsolete', quaint anachronisms from the day of the Personal Computer, left in the dust by the dawning of the age of the Personal Computing. You using Linux? The question ceases to have any real meaning. Inconsequential, absurd like the endless detailing of a New England yarn. Maybe I am, maybe not, frankly my dear, I just don't give damn. Which is, y'know, how it should be, really. You using a Motorola phone? Naw, I'm on Nokia. No matter, I'll call you at ten. Depending what goes down there in Vegas this Friday, this could be a very interesting year in computing indeed.

Massively multiplayer full-framerate surround-sound photorealistic Warcraft, anyone?