In the James Bond movie, “Tomorrow Never Comes“, media mogul Elliott Carver unsuccessfully attempts to dominate the world using his news organization. Some have compared the movie character to Rupert Murdoch, others to American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. I’d like to add two more possible characters; Google’s own Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Over the last few months there has been increasing news about Google’s move towards building it’s own internet backbone. That American internet connectivity lags behind many countries when it comes to speed is not new news but whenever Google decides to solve a problem I start to see an underlying objective that even 007 may not be able to help us with.
Google has it’s own ‘make a TV commercial’ solution with Google TV Ads but wouldn’t it be even better if they ran on a Google TV channel? Based upon reports out last month it seems this is also in the works. The New York Times reported on Google, Sony and Intel collaborating on Google TV, a service that will meld their search, video and Web applications through a good old fashioned TV set. There’s no official word from Google but it seems to make sense. As a media company, Google TV fills a significant void in their arsenal of communication services.
In the normal world we use our PC or MAC to access the world via Microsoft or Apple software. But in a Google world we have every conceivable alternative and it extends way beyond your desktop. A computer running on the Google Chrome OS, will connect through Google’s backbone to access Google TV, punctuated by Google TV Ads and if you don’t want to watch those ads just access your files using Google Docs or watch a video on (Google owned) YouTube while checking email via your Gmail account.
Will it all work? Perhaps, but even if it doesn’t that might be part of a cunning plan 😉
Elliot Carver: Mr. Jones, are we ready to release our new software?
Jones: Yes, sir. As requested, it’s full of bugs, which means people will be forced to upgrade for years.
Elliot Carver: Outstanding.