First, Google cracked the code on Internet search. Then the company used its search platform to build the world’s largest online advertising business. Now, the Silicon Valley icon is turning its attention toward streamlining its business to focus on next-generation hardware and services, particularly in the mobile space. Judging by Google’s latest earnings report, the company’s core business remains robust, as the Cupertino, Calif.-based cash machine posted strong sales and profit growth on Thursday, sending its stock price surging more than 4% in after-hours trading to an all-time high for the second consecutive quarter. SOURCE: Google Is Making Itself a Lot Leaner and Meaner | TIME.com.
I don’t know how many of my readers realize just how earth-shaking the search platform that Google developed was. Before that time it took sometimes hours to find some of the most basic info on the Internet. Let’s take a quick look at what Wiki says:
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Together they own about 16 percent of its shares. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, and its unofficial slogan was “Don’t be evil”. In 2006 Google moved to headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex.
Simply speaking Page and Brin made the internet what it is today. Never mind that Al Gore invented it ( :) ), they changed it from a complex military network into an everyday appliance. For that reason I am an avid fan. Even if I don’t use their browser or some of the other tools they make available. The above article is about how they have grown in the last ten years and where they might be going in the next ten. Will they go the way of Apple or the way of Microsoft? That is a basic question that needs to be answered and I’m sure they are very aware of that difference.
Most of us old guys, especially the techies among us, know that Microsoft and Apple happened at about the same time. Microsoft developed a user interface that totally dwarfed the FORTRAN language that was used to program the IBM mainframes. When I was in college desktop computers were still just a dream. Even in college I realized that computers would be a big part of the future so I took a couple of classes to build an initial foundation. I spent hours writing up a very foreign code and then typing it out on punch cards which were used to put the code in the mainframe very early the next morning. Of course there was always that one card of out hundreds that I misspelled something and therefore the whole lot was rejected.
Thanks to Google, and yes Microsoft and Apple, the initial experiences of new users are vastly different from my own.
RJ's Corner - Having My Say 
It is hard to imagine how different my life would be without Google. It still astounds me that I can simply type in a question about anything, and within a nanosecond Google will have tens of thousands of clickable links that directly address my query.
The one thing that seems almost impossible to visualize now is that, like all companies and inventions, at some point Google will be replaced by something else. In 10 or 20 or maybe 30 years from now It will not dominate our world. The “next” Google will be what everyone depends on. What will that be? Someone not even born yet maybe the source of whatever is next.
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I have been out of the technology world for 14 years now and I think more serious advances have taken place in that time than the 30 years I was there. Amazing how fast some things change. DNA has basically transformed law enforcement and medicine. I see now that someone is on the verge of creating stem cells that will be used to create new organs. Ten years from now that will probably change everything in the medical field if not sooner.
We are indeed in a fascinating time. Now if we can just get more of our young people educated for taking all those advances fully forward. That seems to be the challenge of our times…..
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“I see now that someone is on the verge of creating stem cells that will be used to create new organs. ” Not an organ- but my son in law had his bone transplant taken from his own bone and grown in the lab for three months! The doctor who developed it did it for soldiers and is now doing it in Texas. Amazing stuff!
My daughter an I wonder if education is all about pounding the math or encouraging the imagination. I am both scared and excited for my grandson’s generation. It will be different than ours—-very different!
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I think education is a combination of the two. Let’s face it math and science are the foundation of the 21st century. Without competence in them we will fall by the wayside. Yes, there is a certain amount of pounding in math as you say, at least at the beginning but as it progresses it is much more than that. I see where countries who are leapfrogging us in that area concentrate on the route memorization things through the 5th grade and then move on to the more challenging/creative aspects of math/science. Like much else in the world this is not an either/or black/white situation that so many perceive it to be….
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