Tim O’Reilly’s thoughts on GMail and how Google is shaping how we use the internet before our very eyes:
Gmail is fascinating to me as a watershed event in the evolution of the internet. In a brilliant Copernican stroke, gmail turns everything on its head, rejecting the personal computer as the center of the computing universe, instead recognizing that applications revolve around the network as the planets revolve around the Sun. But Google and gmail go even further, making the network itself disappear into the universal virtual computer, the internet as operating system.
I’ve been dreaming this dream for years. At my conference on peer-to-peer networking, web services, and distributed computation back in 2001, Clay Shirky, reflecting on “Lessons from Napster”, retold the old story about Thomas J. Watson, founder of the modern IBM. “I see no reason for more than five of these machines in the world,” Watson is reputed to have said. “We now know that he was wrong,” Clay went on. The audience laughed knowingly, thinking of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of computers deployed worldwide. But then Clay delivered his punch line: “We now know that he overstated the number by four.”
If the previews, praise and gushing about GMail is to be believed, every internet user on the planet could theoretically have a GMail account that outperforms, outscales and outclasses every free email offering that has ever existed. GMail sounds like the reinvention of the original internet killer app, only better and faster.
The scale and complexity of such an endeavor thrills and boggles the mind. Yahoo and Microsoft take note: Google is about to open up a can of email whup-ass with both of your names on it.
Update: Interesting discussion here about whether or not GMail really lives up to the hype. I’m drinking Google’s kool-aid at the moment, so you can guess where my opinion lies in speculating the future potential GMail, and the infrastructure that runs it, will usher forth. Skynet jr. anyone?
