Web Development and Technology Blog

Like anyone else who lives on their computer like I do, I am a constant user of Google, but I have mixed feelings about the intertwining of my needs and their services. As a (now-former) Windows admin, I spent a LOT of time with Microsoft products, including developing and managing them. I understand the angst about MS and their monopoly, but for all the MS-haters out there, is a “GOOG-opoly” really better?

I am for free enterprise and if someone provides a superior product, then the market should reward them. Google certainly has responded to a market need, in a variety of niches, however, the more areas they go and the more data they suck into the huge data centers, the more they can abuse that power.

This has become of particular concern for me lately.

At my current position, I was running out of mail server space (we outsource it) and I am on two machines, and so IMAP made more sense for me than POP on each. But I couldn’t keep the messages on our server, so I looked around. GMail became my choice, simply because they allow FREE IMAP access and will store (currently) at least 6 GB of data. I have long used Yahoo for webmail, but they charge for IMAP. So I am now using GMail, happily, and didn’t even notice the outage the other day, because I don’t use the web interface AT ALL. Also, it does a Blackberry app, which is nice. My only question is, what does Google get out of this arrangement? I don’t use the web app, so never see the ads, so how are they going to monetize me?

The other area we are using Google now is for their spreadsheet app, because it was so much easier to share documents with others, than me building a new web app for some internal use (although it has given me a great chance to prototype different PHP/AJAX grid frameworks). They already had built some cool little AJAX toys into it, so let them deal with the hassle. But again, how will they monetize this in the future?

I can’t imagine they are just giving me all this bandwidth and disk space (regardless how cheap it is now), just out of some techy-altruism, there is a profit motive in there somewhere! My only conclusion I can reach is that the more I am dependent on them in any one arena, the more likely I am to use them in others and they have already figured out how to monetize many of those areas. So again, I ask, is really a “GOOG-opoly” any better than any other monopoly. We become so dependent on one company, that the opportunity for abuse, may just be too much to resist, regardless of the oft-professed “DO NO EVIL” mantra.