by: Emi Gal
We've all been wondering what's Google trying to do. Why is Microsoft so afraid of them. Why Eric Schmidt joined the Apple Board of Directors.
Let's go back in time for a moment and see how they started: The company founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were not terribly fond of each other when they first met as Stanford University graduate students in computer science in 1995. And although they argued about every topic they discussed, the two founders started working on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website.
In 1998 they finally hit the jackpot and got $100.000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. He made a check out to Google, Inc. Nice, you might say. But Google, Inc didn't existed back then. Ultimately they brought in a total initial investment of almost $1 million.
The Google Search Engine launched in beta, and after short time it was already answering 10.000 search queries each day. Google was moving up in the world. One year later (1999), Google was already serving 500.000 search queries each day, with nearly 8 employees and a garaje office.
In 2000 Google was already the number one search engine in the world. They moved to the Googleplex, hired more and more people, and since then, what started to be a college project became the most innovative company on the planet. They are constantly improving their search algorightm, launched Adsense, a context-based advertising system, Gmail, a email solution that revolutionized the free email market, by offering 1gb storage (and constantly growing, reaching almost 3gb now), Spredsheats, Analytics, Writely, Calendar, Reader, Browser Synchronize, and much more.
Now let's see why Microsoft is so afraid of Google. First of all, the speed. Microsoft has been trying for the last few years to launch Vista, their new operating system. Their corporate system isn't working in a world where information and innovation is everything. The Google guys launch new products on a weekly basis, they are building enormous datacenters, and all this is done with a strategy in mind, no doubt about it.
So where is Google heading? Looking back in history, it's really simple. The Google OS. Online. Wouldn't it be awesome to have all your information online and be able to use it anywhere on the planet, from any computer? Yes, that's where they're heading, and it's not going to be that long until they get there.
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