Digital Dumbo

Google's Hidden Card: Become An ISP

Image via WikipediaSteve Jobs decided a long time ago that he wanted to do both hardware and software. Bill Gates' cofounder Paul Allen wanted the same. But Bill Gates vetoed the idea. He wanted to focus just on software. Software that will run on all kinds of hardware.

You could argue Bill Gates won the first round and Steve Jobs won the second round. But then Google was even more detached from hardware than was Microsoft. And yet Google bought Motorola, a hardware company. Granted it bought Motorola primarily for the patents to hit back in the Android fight. But there is no denying all that hardware.

Larry Page's Challenge

Google is going to build smartphones and tablets in-house. And that is not easy to do. Apple leads that herd.

Google, the king of search, made several clumsy efforts in the social space until it finally hit Google Plus. Google Plus is great, but it is no Facebook. And Google is well positioned in the Big Data space as well as next generation industries like driverless cars. Talk about hardware, software integration. A car is conspicuous hardware.

I think what though will set Google on the path to becoming the most valuable company in the world is Google getting into the ISP space. Hardware-software-connectivity integration beats hardware-software integration. (Not Hardware, Not Software, But Connectivity, One Gig Per Sec: This Is What I Am Talking About)

What would be some of the ingredients? One gigabit per second speed. Ad based. Use snooping technology. (Eric Schmidt's Cloud Computing And My IC Vision)

The snooping technology is that the ISP reads the web addresses of all the websites you visit and serves ads accordingly. It is like Gmail reads all your emails and serves relevant ads. Same thing. It will not be an invasion of privacy. It is machines reading.

Google as a global ISP would eclipse Google as the search engine of choice in terms of influence and revenue. That also might be the best way to conquer the mobile space with Android.