mostly research stuff
…okay, gotta warn you: this is one part of a few in a series in which i’m gonna try to share the history of elGoog’s future and spell out exactly how elGoog challenged microsoft (in the sorta near future) for control of whatever-matters-to-you and-requires-batteries-or-an-outlet...no more blathering on about elGoog’s possible instant messenger, or their challenge to paypal, or their free email service, or their blog offering or ANY of that crap…
the writing is on the wall folks: elGoog is planning to roll up a suite of services on top of their enormous distributed file system and cheap hardware and bring you a new kind of operating system…only you won’t call it an ‘operating system’ - it will just be the ‘thing you use’ to get access to information and people, and it is device and location agnostic…communication agnostic too, but we’ll get to that later…and elGoog is not gonna just compete with the yahoo’s or become an ‘nbc-type-broadcaster’ in a way that you might readily be thinking about it…
…you gotta really look at the whole school of internet-bases-OSes to understand where this is coming from - and of course, understand precisely WHO from the internet-OS invention era is on the elGoog payroll...btw, i am NOT the first to bring this googOS thing up - skrenta talked about it last year, and it’s been parodied by others out there (the oldest and best parody site went down, sorry, no link), but i have not yet found anybody who has yet taken the time to explain why the people behind it matter soooo much (and the spirit has moved me to do so myself, so enjoy)
where to begin? not sure, too much to write plus i’m kind of a lazy shit today, pulling together this - and these other upcoming rants - from a series of long ass notes in my anti-elGoog folder …so, the first point to make: while rumors fly that elGoog is still 80 percent or more ‘male’ with an average employee age of 25 to 27, the people i’m going to be talking about - the folks who matter at this maybe under-priced software company, well..they’re all silver foxes at the googleplex, gray heads with decades of serious experience in databases, operating systems and languages…am i talking about bosworth and the crossgain types? no. the firefox hires? no, those people are just afterthoughts for what elGoog is planning, and easily replaced…
so let’s go back in time, to the start of all of this nonsense, when barry and sergio were still drawing nipples on their sisters’ barbie dolls and UNIX launched the career of ken thompson - who also worked with rob pike on unix, and later, on a very, very new type of OS…(btw, pike has one of the coolest email addresses at elGoog…and please note here that ken is now at entrisphere , still super smart - creating cool voice, video and data services that certainly will matter to elGoog…and yes, he still keeps in touch with rob, per these nearly-lost online exchanges…)
…um, yeah, so then there’s also crazysmart alan kay and the inventors of smalltalk, which is basically what sun microsystems sells and calls their own thing (yes, that’s an opinion)….and damn, it IS important because running the virtual machine is kind of what the future elGoog might feel like…your virtual computer so to speak…like an OS built from some kinda vm-based idea, but blended with a lotta ideas that ken and rob toyed with, and which in turn stemmed from things that kay and co might have been (arguably) thinking about much earlier (and which you can sorta see in their new croquet project): extending your computer system beyond files to “names” and unique paths to any objects (could be a file, screen, user, or computer and so on - think now a bit more about what elGoog is offering you today, this very day, and you’ll see this picture all kinda coming together)…and of course, ‘objects’ are the idea behind smalltalk, right? is everything really just a new version of unix or smalltalk? whatever… gotta go pick up my kids at school…more to come on all of this, and of course, i’m soliciting input on this serialized rant ;)
this blog is mostly safe for work, though i sometimes throw around a 'fuck' or two. you'll find a bunch of my articles from CI Magazine, SCIP online, other research pieces and some other crap. enjoy. there's lost of content here related to getting information about, around, from and through people and organizations...
mESH
June 28th, 2005 at 4:02 pm
this is an amazing article.
David Carpe
June 28th, 2005 at 7:46 pm
thanks! i knew somebody was reading my site! (excluding me re-reading everything..)
..and keep your eyes out for the later chapters, they are MUCH more interesting ;)
matt
June 29th, 2005 at 9:42 am
I would like to hear how you believe this will effect security in the future. Will it become another xp that requires weekly(or daily) updates, will it be a rough and tough Unix, or will it be a virtual black market of advertisers sneaking in through back doors placed conveniently by the creators?
David Carpe
June 29th, 2005 at 12:00 pm
very good point…elGoog has some super bright security folks, and security is a specific issue within a later chapter about your future - the one where one sign-on runs your life…however, microsoft is much, much better at security architecture - and while people like to poo-poo on them for all sorts of crap, the reality is that their security architecture brain-trust dwarfs every rival out there, across all areas of application architecture (e.g. we all heard about people breaking into gmail a few months back…but when was the last time you heard about a hotmail break in? or a yahoo mail break in for that matter?)
some of the security ideas stem from the work that these folks have been doing (the folks i’m gonna be talking about)…and in a way, it feels a lot like the confinement architecture ideas that were in unix ages ago…