Steve Gillmor extends the notion of Google as a platform. Some extracts:
One way to handicap Google is to deconstruct the notion that Google’s intellectual property is bound solely to search. In fact, it’s bound to the emerging platform known as software-as-a-service. Fellow IPO salesforce.com offers a hosted software service, which can easily plug into legacy enterprise systems. The underlying fabric for enabling software-as-a-service is XML Web services, which are commoditizing the cost of integrating disparate hardware and software systems, and enabling a service-oriented architecture (SOA). …
Add an intelligent cache that sits between Google servers and the browser, such as the Alchemy framework Adam Bosworth developed for BEA before he jumped to Google, and you have a standards-based, offline storage capability for use with laptops and occasionally connected clients such as PDAs, iPods, and cell phones. …
In moving toward this software-as-a-service platform, Google has some interesting partners-in-waiting – the carriers and their partners (Sun, Motorola, Nokia), the increasingly Web-focused broadband players (TiVo, SBC, Dish Network) who are circumventing cable and record companies with direct-from-Web downloads to personal video recorders, and micro-content creators (exercise left to the reader.) Add together this loosely-coupled group of companies and their aggregated market caps, and today’s price per share for Google starts to look like a bargain. [The G-spot – News – ZDNet]
