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After stumbing over the video of Jeff Dean's talk about Google, I started to look round to see if I could find anything else. I almost immediately found a copy of a talk by Urs Hölzle, given back in 2002 at the University of Washington, about the software and hardware infrastructure behind the Linux clusters at Google.


Eric Schmidt talking at Stanford's School of Business
However thanks to a link from Search Engine Watch I also came across a video of Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, talking about Google to the Stanford Graduate School of Business last April. It's less technical than Jeff or Urs' talk, but since Eric's talk was given in spring last year, it's interesting to see how some of the developments that Google have come up with over the last year are hinted at during his presentation.

For instance at one point Eric says ""We're trying to make Google a place where people live online", considering Google's recent movement away from "just" being a search engine, to providing rich web applications like Google Maps. This is interesting, and make me more willing to believe some of the wilder rumours the possible future for Google itself...

Perhaps one day you'll log on, check your GMail, grab the route to your meeting using Google Maps then check when you're favourite programme is going to be broadcast using Google Video and set a reminder for Google to record it for you using the Google video player, a rich web application which hosts the content remotely, streaming it to your desktop on demand.

Then you start up your Google word processor and spreadsheet applications, both rich web applications which bill you via micropayments when you use them, safe in the knowledge that all your data is stored in remotely and you don't have top worry about local backups or loosing your data. It looks like thin clients are back with a vengeance.

Maybe Google is the next Microsoft, maybe we should be scared...