The secret purpose of Google Fiber
Josh Miller has published a post, in which he argues that the next website (app?) to be worth $100 bln will need to come up with a platform making possible unawkward chatting and making friends with folks you don’t know, yet share something in common, as it used to be in the old IRC days.
We might well see it happening in the near future. What seems confusing is its prospects of becoming the next Facebook, i.e. a very young yet powerful tech giant outplaying supergiants of the previous days on a new rapidly growing field which will eventually threaten their own status quo. Here is why.
There are two types of opportunities for tech companies aiming at entering A league. In the first case you create the opportunity from scratch essentially starting the big wave, and then, if you wish/can, ride it, while in the second case you take advantage of the wave recently started by someone else and scale it. First type companies create the cornerstone technology as a scaffold for the future wave and then leverage its potential. Examples: Intel, Google, Akamai. No wonder research labs were the cradle for all of them. Second type companies are Amazon and Yahoo (remember, originally it was just a curated website directory), both scaled the web 1.0 opportunity, and Facebook, which essentially rode the second web wave, started and fueled by the broadband burstout leading to the user boom and connectivity explosion. Peter Thiel would call it going from 0 to 1 as opposed to going from 1 to n.
It’s important to understand that usually these two opportunities alternate: if a big wave has already begun either harness it or wait with your disrupting innovation until it dies out.
Many people believe that today to make it the next Facebook you need just to build something immensely popular online and since all webdev tools are here, it’s just a matter of imagination. The fact that so many folks share this opinion is already alarming, but the problem is even bigger: most of the audience expansion wave momentum, which propelled Facebook, has in fact already burn out and soon it will be time for eggheads to say again their word on expanding digital connectivity to ever new life spheres. That’s why chances are the next Facebook will be a google: a company originating from some lab-grown cornerstone piece of engineering and I could suggest an example of one important question to look into in this context: what do we really need 1 Gb/s for?
You know about the Google Fiber project, Samsung has just tested 5G in NYC, but current 20 Mb/s is more than enough for watching HD House of cards and playing Counter Strike. Do we really need just a lot more of the same pixels? So, what could we do with 1 Gb/s, consumerly speaking? 5D hologram telepresence? Brain–computer interface enabled neurosocial graf with affective Skype? Connected virtual reality? That’s a question.
