May 29th, 2008
Google bets future on improving Client, Connectivity, and Cloud
On Wednesday morning, Vick Gundotra, Engineering VP at Google opened the Google I/O developer’s conference in San Francisco. I jotted down a few (ok, a lot of) notes for this and other sessions that I’d like to share with you. This is not quite a transcript, but rather a paraphrasing of the main points from Gundotra and other speakers.
Advancing the web is critical to the entire Internet ecosystem. How are we going to do this? There are 3 primary areas of investment: Client, Connectivity, and Cloud. Some of the challenges are ones that all developers face. Some of the tensions of the past have re-occurred. We think we’re at the cusp of solving some of those tensions.
In the beginning there was the Mainframe era. It was marked by powerful capability, not very accessible, easy deployment, less functionality. Next was the Personal Computer era - less powerful, more accessibility, harder deployment, more functional.
Then came the Internet era - same tensions again. The browser is the client that matters for the web. We were back to dumb terminals. Browsers limited us in what we were able to do. On the server there was massive capability: clouds. Clouds in many respects are just as inaccessible as mainframes were. Google spends millions investing in data centers, which is out of reach of most developers.
Is this where we are? At Google we believe we can solve these problems, by making the cloud more accessible, and making the client more powerful. It’s like an “in-phase wave transition”. Amplification not cancellation. And during all this, keep connectivity pervasive.
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Ed Burnette is a professional developer and author of several articles and books about computing including Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, 2nd Edition. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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