Google just announced that Vinton (Vint) Cerf, the longtime technologist who is widely known as a “founding father” of the Internet, as Chief Internet Evangelist. This is their continuing bid to acquire the best brains in the world. Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet clearly qualifies. The kind of stuff that forces Steve Ballmer to throw chairs at office walls.
But reading the press release you will find elements that tie into my GoogleNet piece that ran in the last issue of Business 2.0.
> Cerf will continue his leadership in the Internet community, and help Google build network infrastructure, architectures, systems, and standards for the next generation of Internet applications.
Aka GoogleNet.
> “Google has already made tremendous strides in making access to information on the web a reality for users across the globe, but we’re still in the Internet’s early innings,” he said. “This medium will enjoy wider-spread use than television, radio or phones, and will ultimately expand beyond planet Earth. Google has always believed in doing things differently, and I believe that places us in a unique position to help bring even the wildest Internet visions into reality.”
As an aside, it is becoming increasingly obvious that MCI-purge has started, and Verizon has no interest in academics who are more famous than the management (of VZ.)
glad to microsoft just sit there and bit!@#$ about it. they are just a large hulking giant with a POS OS. thank god for google or we still would be using crappy e-mail systems like hotmail and yahoo or something as innovative as Google Maps…alright i’ll stop.
I see nothing in that press release that suggests whatsoever that Google is getting into the Wi-Fi business….
In fact no offense, but I saw little concrete evidence in your original GoogleNet article of that either. Mozilla-fueled portal deals with ISPs? Yeah, probably. Free Ad-driven Wi-Fi for the whole country? Not so much.
Though I’ve been wrong before. I thought the Apple 2gs was a kickin’ system. 🙂
Om , i know you would love to speculate about this ,but i still think Google has no interest in getting into the ISP business …IMO the dark fiber purchase has something to do with reducing their bandwith bill and nothing more
Cerf will make a great recruiting tool; who wouldn’t want a chance to work with him.
Om,
Did we forget so soon about the problems that MCI Worldcom just went through? If you were in the shoes of Cerf who has had a great career at MCI and is now in his early 60s, why would you want to stick around a company that has been tarnished so badly and move on to try your hand at something else before retiring? Schmidt, Brin and Page certainly do not need Cerf for strategy, etc. The cultures of each business are very quite different — Cerf is not going to be sitting around the table with Brin and Page talking about Semantic Web apps and cackling about Web Ontology Language (OWL) for example (IMHO).
I’m certainly pleased for Vint, I’m sure that his talents and ideas will be well represented at Google. It seems to me that even the task of engineering Googles own networks, and particularly optimizing them for carrying and indexing all the different kinds of data that are now essential for comprehensive searching will be a sizable challenge in and of itself.
Think about it for a moment; Google’s stated goal is to index, archive and make searchable all the world’s information. That’s no small goal.
As applications become richer and richer and as Google takes steps towards being a provider of more feature rich applications itself, their network will arguably be one of the largest and most heavily trafficked private networks ever conceived. Never mind that ultimately Google hands the traffic off to a peer, data must still flow efficiently prior to that moment, and there’s no doubt in my mind that Vint can achived the efficiency required as well as anyone.
-Oliver Starr
http://www.mobile-weblog
That’s RIGHT man in RIGHT place !!
GooglePlex, or “GoogleNet” seems to be on a collision course with the technology disclosed in U.S. Patent No. 6,324,586.
http://www.6324586.com
If Google doesn’t acquire this patent soon then some other company will (and thus will) rule the future of the digital world!