Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

image credit: akakumo [Flickr]

Editor's Note: For the entire month of September, the year of Google's 10 year anniversary, they will be marking the occasion by asking their experts, "What's going to happen in the next ten years?" Since their philosophy is that the best way to predict the future is to invent it, their vision of the future of the web comes very much from the flavor of the Google Kool-Aid.

So Organic felt that this would be a good opportunity for us to respond to Google's vision of the future as they tell it, with our vision of the future.

The Intelligent Cloud by Alfred Spector, VP Engineering, and Franz Och, Research Scientist

When people talk about Cloud Computing, they tend to lose their grounding in reality. Here are some important things to consider:

1. It's going to take a while for people (and businesses) to come around to trusting the cloud:

"It's not an OS (contrary to anything Mike Arrington says), and it will not be the answer to everyone's problems. People have an attachment to ownership - something that won't go away as easily as we think. Mainframe computing would have never worked as the sole option for the layperson computer user, and it won't work for the mainstream internet consumer/user/contributor."
Alex Bisceglie

But this isn't markedly different from the transition that we are undergoing with adoption of RIAs today. As people begin to view remote data as just as stable and secure as local data (Google Docs v Word), I think the likelihood of adoption goes up.

2. The cloud 'owners' need to work very closely with developers and users of their system to ensure that many of the base assumptions that we currently hold about applications stand true in the new world. eg: currently, there is no good way to do data backups inside of Google's App Engine (their cloud computing product). In reality, I should probably trust Google to have better data redundancy and failover backup capability than I would cook up, but at a very base level its very different from how developers work today.

But... it's going to happen, its going to be incredible and it looks (for now at least) that Google is going to lead the charge. Already they are using user activity to train their systems to very good effect. For example, they've been running Google411 as a free information service for quite some time, with the stated goal of teaching machines how to best recognize and parse human speech. The output? http://labs.google.com/gaudi full text indexing of video and audio content.

In a nutshell: its happening now and overall I think its a very good thing. But it needs to be closely monitored to ensure it doesn't become a very bad thing quickly.

James Vreeland