Who needs 500-gigabyte hard drives and a 6-megabyte L2 cache when lots of input ports and a fast wireless connection will do? That’s the rhetorical question that has lately prompted the meteoric rise of the netbook, a bare-bones laptop that gets most of its muscle from online services.
Off you go to the howling wastelands of Yahoo Search and MapQuest.īut, really, why should Google bother with you when, with its superpowers, it can take on much bigger game? Like, say, Microsoft?Īlthough you’ll never hear it from Google, the Chrome suite looks an awful lot like a dagger aimed straight at Microsoft’s heart. Gmail could gobble up your feverish love letters Maps could send you down an endless series of side streets long ago blocked by freeways and housing developments. It could frustrate your flailing attempts to find out where the hyoglossus muscle is. Google could annoy you in myriad ways if it wanted to. (There’s even the PowerMeter application, which can tell when you’ve been naughty or nice with your electricity usage.)
Omniscience? The eponymous search engine is perhaps as close to a complete index of the sum total of human knowledge as has ever existed. There’s Gmail, Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google Earth, Google Mars, Google Apps (the word-processing, spread-sheeting service). There’s a test for that: omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent.
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