Bill Gates has bought a stake in the UK carpet retailer Carpetright, according to this article. A strange choice of business, at first sight, but what if he’s working on interactive floor coverings? Put the Carpetright story together with this one, and all becomes clear.
I have a fairly complicated personal IT set-up. We have a Mac at home, I use Vista on my “work” computer, and I carry my Asus eee (running Ubuntu in its eeexubuntu flavour) practically wherever I go. Gradually, little by little, Google is stitching it all together for me, creating a little ecosystem of applications that mean I have my stuff wherever I happen to be.
The latest thing is Google Docs, Google’s online word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software, which has been developing well for a while now, but which has just rolled out offline functionality. This uses something called Google Gears to store copies of the documents I work with on Google Docs in an offline cache, with the code they need to work, so that I can edit all my Google Docs on the train, and they just get updated automatically next time I’m online.
My personal email account (for my own domain, not a gmail address) is now Google driven too. And I at last have the ability to sync my Outlook calendar with Google Calendar, which allows me to share my free time with anyone who has a web browser, ending all those daft unsolicited meeting requests I get at a stroke.
How’s Google going to get the money back for all this? The application development might be a one-off, but the storage bill (and the electricity for the data centres is the big one nowadays) must keep going up and up. Theorists will point out that a central storage infrastructure replacing all those local ones in peoples’ personal computers is more efficient in the long run, but where’s the money going to come from? Advertising seems somehow inappropriate as a revenue stream for this kind of service. My bet is they’ll end up charging for it directly somehow, but I’m sure they have some interesting ideas in the pipeline for monetising the Google desktop.
