This might be the most important revelation in the technology business this year. Google wants to know everything about you, and help you organize every aspect of your daily life. It's a radical expansion of their footprint and mission from organizing the world's information to organizing the world's personal information. Not unexpected, but perhaps earlier than expected, Google has acknowledged that they will catalog everything, and build more intelligence on top of that catalog. Their apps business? A mechanism to capture more of your data to feed the maw of the search engine, and provide raw material for their analytics business to build upon in the future.
Rob Hyndman notes that 10 years ago Double-Click was run out of town for a similar vision. Have we come that far?
The breadth of the goal is awesome. Whether society is ready for it is entirely another question.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
