Intersting article that builds on the ideas in the GoogleZon animation and analyses the potential impact of Google’s Web Accelerator.
“If Google adds power to its part of the Accelerator, you don’t have to add power to your end, meaning your old PC can last longer. Part of that has to come from Google assuming a larger role over time, taking responsibility for rendering Flash, for example. And they’ll do it. And we’ll let them. At some point, Google might even offer its own hardware device, optimized for the Accelerator. At that point, you’ll buy your PC from Google, use Google as your ISP, surf an Internet that is really the Google cache, be fed ads and sold content from Google servers. Its a GoogleWorld that requires no AOL, no Microsoft, no Intel, no HP or Dell — only Google, cable companies, telephone companies, users, and of course advertisers and web page producers.”
And this on the Net in Asia –
“But in Asia, the web is a minor part of the internet user’s activities, and once you deduct Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail usage, it’s almost negligible. A typical Asian internet user is online to play LAN games and do instant messaging. In cafes, you’ll see “internet” promoted as a separate item below “Games” and “Chat” – almost as if it’s an afterthought. A PC in the East is a rather more colorful Minitel that hosts multiplayer games. Fetishizing the web has blinded many in the West, and not just techno-utopians, to what people really want from computer networks, as successful “closed” computer networks from Minitel, and possibly GSM with its SMS service prove. So while Western experts lose their minds to utopian fantasies such as “the web is now nature”, the Asian mind looks for rather more practical uses for technology. And it’s Asia that will be the largest influence on the computer networks in the next decade, with a billion Chinese being urbanized over the next decade, pulling Indo-China along behind it, and half a billion newly affluent on the Indian sub-continent. Will these billions of users want to rely on a GoogleNet?”
Check it here.