a great post from the Google Blog
If any of the following quotes interest you at all, you should really take the time to read this reasonably lengthy, but very compelling post from Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP, Product Management on the Google Blog:
The post was originally an internal document for Googlers but was encouraged to be made public - Many, many thanks to those who thought this. Anyway, I encourage anyone who is interested at all in any of the above snippets from the post to go and have a read. Despite being orignally an internal document and drawing inspiration from President Barack Obama/Presidents Day in the USA, it has great relevance (excuse the pun) for many of us with an interest in search and related technologies.
- we are in the midst of what is likely the worst economic situation of our lifetimes
- Access to information has completed its journey from privileged to ubiquitous
- All the world's information will be accessible from the palm of every person
- More than three billion people have mobile phones, with 1.2 billion new phones expected to be sold this year
- Our ongoing challenge is to create the perfect search engine
- Why should a user have to ask us a question to get the information she needs?
- Everyone can publish, and everyone will
- 120K blogs are created daily — most of them with an audience of one
- No one argues the value of free speech, but the vast majority of stuff we find on the web is useless
- The Surui tribe in the Amazon rain forest uses Google Earth to mark the boundaries of their land and work with authorities to stop illegal logging
- the vast majority of computing will occur in the cloud
- the consumer market now gets the greatest innovations first
- The real potential of cloud computing lies not in taking stuff that used to live on PCs and putting it online, but in doing things online that were previously simply impossible
- Combining open standards with cloud computing will enable businesses to conduct commerce in brand new ways
- As more people do more things online computer systems will have the opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans
