Afer PageRank, then what.

This is what (and its like cousins) has changed the outlook of the internet.
I call it the gateway to the internet.

There is a 100 billion US dollars financial and technological behemoth behind this brilliantly simple (almost stupid) page. That kind of money can buy Kenya and every human being standing in it.

But for how long will the good times last? Sure, pagerank is a brilliant indexing algorithm. But so was InkTomi before it, and others. Google's business model is difficult to understand at best. It is revolutionary, yes, and that may be its undoing. Being so original, all the big shots want a piece of it (including MSFT). My fear is that such massive capitalization will not yield returns; Old school rules of Economics will kick in and money will start to be pulled out. There will be nowhere for Google to go but down.

Worse, another genius (or two) might come up with another out-of-the world indexing concept. You are probably thinking that Google has herded to its headquarters all the mathematical wizards it can find and such a possibility is remote; And I will remind you that before Google came into being, other companies like Yahoo, MSFT and IBM have been tinkering with indexing and library algorithms for decades. They did not stumble on the 2 famous eggheads, and the rest is history. Comparing with other leading technology companies, I am predicting a longer stay in the scene for them rather than Google. Of course, I could be (and most likely will be) wrong, just like countless other times:

MSFT: The last good thing they made had "2000" somewhere in it. That is Windows 2000, Sql Server 2000, Office 2000. After that they went to sleep and all they do is add more colour to perfectly good systems. And code that no one needs. In the end, everything runs slower. Luckily for them, there are millions of clueless zealots who snap to attention everytime MSFT strategists cough. Ironically, the bloated software which is supposed to help, enhance their experience with it, just doesn't (leaving support personnel with intractable problems).

Apple Inc. Their MACs are pricey. But then they have the iPod. They have grabbed entertainment savvy people by the balls. As for operating systems like Mac OS or OS X, overrated. No real big deal.

Oracle. They have this new thing they call "grid computing" coming with the latest release of Oracle DB (10g). My company has already installed it and now there are more problems than before. Anyway, if you are doing real heavy processing, you don't have a choice. The only other competition here is DB4.

RedHat. They have this smart server OS that is like a fortress. However, damn thing needs rocket scientists to run and maintain.

Sun Microsystems. Did I say MACs are pricey? For high costs, Sun machines win the race hands down. I don't know what you would have to run to require those sparc arrays of theirs. They were among the first to hit the Tera mark as far as memory is concerned. They do 64 bit RISC on the lower side, almost always multi-processor based (4,8,16 to 64 I think). In keeping up the reputation of being exceedingly complex, they made a revolutionary, crazy-difficult platform called Java (IBM and other companies make more money from Java than Sun). I almost chipped trying to do a project in Java. Solaris is neat. Simple enough, robust but, yes you guessed right. Expensive.

IBM. Methusellah. Been around from the turn of the previous and current century.

All these guys have a product. Google has a service. Not terribly comfortable.

On another note. I am going to ignore my own wise counsel, and drink today. My money, has never earned itself, so tell me someone, why should I spare it? Goode weekend.