Robert X. Cringely – love him or hate him – usually has something interesting to say in his weekly I, Cringely column.

This week’s column talked about how Google may (or may not) bid for the 700Mhz spectrum that’s coming off TVs and onto wireless sometime in 2009.

But that’s not what I’m here to write about.

As part of his column, Cringely wrote the following (emphasis added):

Bill Gates likes to talk about how fragile is Microsoft’s supposed monopoly and how it could disappear in a very short period of time. Well Microsoft is a Pyramid of Giza compared to Google, whose success is dependent on us not changing our favorite search engine.

Hmm…makes a great deal of sense, to a degree. Search – or, rather, posting ads in search – is what pays the bills in a huge way at the GooglePlex.

But here is what I think, and have thought for over three years (I remember that because I mentioned same in a job interview more than three year ago): Google is an Application Company.

This was after the purchase of Blogger, but before Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google maps and so on.

The stuff that gets better every day. For example, I’ve only recently used Google spreadsheets seriously, but very impressed. Excel killer? Not today. Tomorrow????

These tools work so well because Google groks the web better than any other company I know (vast generalization you can easily shoot down, but you get the drift: Google is good). You could say Google gets the web like Microsoft used to understand the desktop (Steve Jobs ran with what Palo Alto and MS did well and did it better). MS, to me, shows its age with Vista, but that’s another rant.

Yet Google keeps giving these apps away. You wouldn’t catch MS doing that (well, except for IE, and that 1) Shows how little MS understood the web, and 2) Look at all the hot water it got them into).

No money to be made in giving stuff away, right?

Wrong.

Here’s where I think Google is headed:

• Keep improving the existing online apps
• Add more: some will live; some will die
• Get to the point where a quorum has used/feels comfortable with the apps
• Build an enterprise control panel for the apps. So you – the admin of a small business – can add/edit/delete apps and USERS of apps. Goodbye Office
• The Gmail sign in for all Google tools is paving the way for this.
• The admin tool will be paid (subscription, probably). It’ll be a low barrier to entry. Make it attractive to small businesses.
• In light of what I’ve seen Google do in the past, the admin tool will be an “all you can eat” model, with various levels (with increasing prices). In other words, if you just need the basic apps and user control, $X per year – NOT per seat. 1 or 1,000 users, same price. But if you need Y, then it’s $2X per year – but, again, for everyone. Keep it simple stoopid – once the infrastructure’s in place, it’s mostly gravy but for (Google) internal bandwidth and storage, which it seems to have pretty much solved already: I was a beta tester of Gmail and I still use it like an FTP server. I just can’t get over the 4-6% storage mark!
• Think of the power of this, and what that admin tool might (ultimately, not at launch) be able to do: Create access rules to areas the “company’s” (stored at Google) files, what apps certain folks could use, and so on. An individual leaves the company? One checkbox forwards all that email to an admin inbox, locks user out of company apps (though user can still use the generic Google apps) and so on. I’m sorry, this is incredibly powerful.
• Imagine the power of backups! Sure, most/many companies have a “share” drive you’re supposed to work off of or back up to periodically, but…. Losing data just became harder.
• With an online app, updates are seamless and update ALL systems at the same time. Wow, what a time saver!
• One component will be a server that does need to be (auto) installed on a user machine – Google already does this with Google desktop, so they have a few 10s of millions of machines as Beta testers. This server will be for offline work, which will auto sync once a network connection (hard line or wireless) is found.
• The options are limitless, because the application does not exist per se, as does MS Word, for example. It’s embedded into the fabric of the web. Wow.

Is this really where Google is headed? I dunno.

It makes sense to me, but what do I know?

All I know is that someone – probably many someones – is heading in this direction. That’s gotta be correct.

Google is in the right place; we’ll have to see if it’s the right time.

UPDATE: (a few minutes later) One large roadblock – real and perceived roadblock to this type of online suite is privacy. We’re putting customer financials on Google’s (or company X’s) servers. Are they going to peek? Are they going to accidentally add this data to the Google general index?? (Yes, this will happen at some point…) Legit concerns; issues that should be addressed before launching or adopting a service such as I have laid out above.

UPDATE 8/1/2007 – I don’t mean this to mean this is the only direction Google is headed, but one place they are going. Search/ads still pay the bills, but we must diversify…

well, it’s been a couple of weeks since we got back from vacationing in Montana, and I still don’t have all the pics I want to post in the Montana gallery.

That’s for a number of reasons, which follow:

• I’m posting more pictures than in the past. This is not necessarily a good thing (it means I’m posting more pics that have sentimental/informational value, as opposed to “good pics”)
• It’s been a busy couple of weeks at work
• It’s been a busy couple of weeks at work, and I pretty much (first pass) hand process pics before I post (when I have a pic to post, I then load and ImageMagik makes the full and thumb; uploads same. Home-grown tool: Linux/PHP/HTML/ImageMagik).

This means little to almost everyone but me.

This post is for me!

And – after I’m done with the Montana gallery, I want to break this out so all the Glacier National Park pics are also in a separate gallery. Glacier was, overwhelmingly, the photographic high point of the trip. I could spend a year there with a camera(s)….

t’s late after a long day, and – of course – I’m still coding.

Night is a good time to reflect, especially as you are watching the tail -f on a script you just fired off for the billionth time.

Quick notes – Tech memes without legs, so I can be on the record as incredibly incorrect:

• Twitter — I just don’t get it. Geek love; I understand. But no legs. Even the younger geeks I talk to dismiss it.
• GreaseMonkey — Love the concept, but buying into the MS ActiveX camp: Must have X browser with Y extension installed. Nope….
• OMPL — Dave Winer – whom I respect – is behind this all, but – as with Twitter – no one I know (geeks) get/grok/care about it
• Ruby — Nice language, the Rails framework is nice. But…why? Slow, based on Python (which is wicked fast) and competes, basically, with PHP (FOSS and fast) and JSP (sorta OSS; compiled fast but a clunky language).

Am I totally wrong?

Of course!

Just jotting down some notes about how I feel right now.

History will judge…

Well, today is the official end of my vacation for this year – it’s Sunday, and we just got back from about four days in Montana on Friday.

I’m furiously trying to get the pics together in my gallery, but it’s going to take awhile.

In the meantime, a teaser of what’s to come is posted here.

That’s Lake Saint Mary in Glacier National Park – part of a breathtaking drive over the continental divide called the Going Into the Sun Drive. Pretty amazing.

I’ll explain later, but I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotations – the last graphs of Norman MacLean’s brilliant novella, A River Runs Through It.

It’s worth reading if only so you can truly appreciate these last graphs, and be able to go back to them from time to time. That’s great writing.

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Artic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Yes, it is iDay – the day of the iPhone launch.

Do I want one? Yep. (Why wouldn’t any even slightly geeky individual not want one?)

Do I need one? Nope.

Will I get one? Nope (at least not now).

Do I think this changes everything about cellphones, as has been the general buzz?

Yep.

The one striking thing I note when I read reviews about this product is that the reviews are not about a cellphone, the reviews are about a mobile device that does A, B & C – oh, and you can use it as a phone, as well.

I do think this is a watershed moment in cell phones and all mobile devices; I’ll be interested to see what Apple does next (3G, for example) with this device.

And that’s the key – it’s not a cellphone.

It’s a device. A handheld computer.

Steve Jobs appears to be an overbearing, Type-A asshole controlling freak of a boss, but he seems to have a handle on not only what people want, but – more importantly for sales – on what they should want.

And the innovation – based on existing tech, agreed, but put together in a friendly form – is astounding.

And thanks to the reality-distortion field, Job’s attention to detail, some amazing UI and tech engineers, here is a device everyone wants.

Let’s see how reality plays out now that XX users have the iPhone and begin banging away on it…

I’ve flipped the switch to display my summer theme (CSS) as it’s now summer.

Whoo-hoo!

Can it get more exciting??? I think not…..

Yep, it’s 10pm here.

I have a couple (minimum) of hours of work before hitting the sack.

REMEMBER: If you sleep, the terrorists have won…

YES I’m being facetious…

When I awoke today
Suddenly nothing happened

— Colin Hay, Waiting for my Real Life to Begin

I sought out this song after hearing it on an episode of Scrubs (excellent use of music on this show).

In the show, it was sung by a woman, and I still want a cover of this song by a woman: It just worked better for me than Hay’s (a guy’s) version.

But an excellent song, outstanding Scrubs episode and some poignant lyrics.

Junk e-mail continued to land in mailboxes around the world Thursday, despite the arrest a day earlier of a man described as one of the world’s most prolific spammers.

– Spam flows despite high-profile arrest, MSNBC

I a shocked, shocked to discover that there [are more than more than one spammer] going on [in these tubes].

Like slapping a mosquito. Duh.

OK – it’s a good thing and sends a message, but it will not affect spam in the least bit. Sorry. That’s the reality.