Googles future?
Cringley has written an article on disecting the secretive future plans of Google.
Google now controls more network fiber than any other organization, and has been buying up real estate for local server farms. In Cringleys example, Google has bought out 520 acres of industrial real estate. Why would Google need such a large amount of server space for a relatively small population?
“Of course this doesn’t answer the question why Google needs so much capacity in the first place, but I have a theory on that. I think Google is building for a future they see but most of the rest of us don’t. I’ll go further and guess that Google is planning to build similar data centers in many states and that the two centers they are apparently preparing to build here in South Carolina are probably intended mainly to SERVE South Carolina. That’s perhaps 100,000 servers for four million potential users or 40 users per server. What computing service could possibly require such resources?
The answer is pretty simple. Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television.”
It all makese interesting reading, and Cringley’s idea of Google intending on providing high bandwidth services en mass through many local datacenters does explain the unusual real estate buying that has been going.