Apple, Facebook, and Google: The War for Hearts and Minds and What It Means to You

The rapid adoption of high-speed connections is inexorably bringing to realization the scenario for which Internet visionaries Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have been positioning themselves for years.

There are other pretenders but these Web 2.0 behemoths are positioning themselves for world domination:

• Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and digital text platforms indicate that Amazon intends to be in the mix and also sees itself as the technology foundation for a potential global ecosystem of writers and publishers.
  
• Apple's expected tablet announcement today demonstrates that Apple increasingly sees itself as the potential middleman in the entire media content delivery industry (print, movies, television, Web).
  
• Google believes that as bandwidth and mindset shifts allow software and data to continue migrating to the cloud, many users will have only netbooks or phones rather than PC's. These users would only need Google's free Chrome operating system, Google Apps and Google Docs, leaving Windows only for power users and much of the corporate world.
  
• Microsoft is scrambling to play catch-up with its Azure cloud platform and Office Live, and is surprisingly being considered almost as an underdog, struggling on many fronts to maintain its leadership position.
  
• Facebook envisions itself as the portal through which nearly all users will access everything else.
  

Interesting times! Google's goal is to be for applications and documents what Facebook has become for social networking, a universal solution. Google Docs provides free on-line replacements for the Microsoft Office applications, all running and storing data in the cloud. They're currently unsophisticated replacements for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, etc, but already good for casual use. Google Apps for business is already being marketed. This trend will certainly grow increasingly important during the few years; The only question is, how far can Google take it.

Already, more users worldwide access the Internet only by phone than do users with traditional computers. As this story unfolds, document editing, email, presentations, photo and video editing, games, tax preparation, music, digital books on the tablet -- in short, nearly all the applications the typical user needs -- will be available over the Web. Documents, photos, video and any other type of data will be stored in the Cloud. Users will require mostly netbooks, tablets, and phones. Fewer users will need a desktop or even a laptop computer. That means no Windows operating system, no Microsoft Office applications, no need to burn DVDs, and no flash drives.

The immediately compelling aspect of all of this to the consumer is that it's currently all free. Well, it's free in terms of money, but there are privacy and security considerations. For example, Google's current business model is based on ad-generated revenue. While no other user can see your unshared Google documents and Gmail, the system scans all this in order to target the ads you will see. Password security will also become increasingly important.

Notes
Cloud computing platform will result in a move away from corporate data centers for all but sensitive data. As the reputations of the Amazon and Microsoft data repositories grow more rock-solid perhaps they will be thought of as standard storage solutions for most applications used by all segments of the marketplace. There were 60,000 businesses using Amazon behind the scenes as of a report I read two years ago. Amazon Web services was already consuming more bandwidth than the rest of Amazon at that time. Banks and pharmaceutical companies were mentioned in particular as having tried AWS on a test basis before getting hooked by the value (Amazon and Microsoft are charging extremely low rates, pennies per gigabyte).

Security is good with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure: The developer uses SQL identical to that which would be used with a corporate database, but with a connection string that routes the data over the Internet. Amazon/Microsoft takes care of scaling the number of servers and bandwidth, fault-tolerance of the drives, transaction processing, etc.