Scneario 4: Google's Dominance over all Media (Circa 2012)
--Ning 12:27, 5 May 2006 (MDT)
Introduction
It all began from the launch of Google News beta in April 2002, which is an automated new aggregator. In the following 10 years, Google gradually becomes the dominant player in almost all traditional and new media.
Internet
"To Google" has already been a hit verb among the Y-generation since 2002. For even youger people espectially those born after the new millennium, "Google" is not only a verb or a noun, but also become interchangeable with "Internet", "computer" and "phone calls" since google is on the way of transforming itself into a new technology platform, a new communication network and the Internet itself.
Google: the new Internet service provider
In 2007, Google will start its own urban wireless Internet project called GoogleNet which is focused on the wireless Internet access coverage for most of American major urban areas beginning with metropolitan cities such as New York and Los Angeles. Soon, GoogleNet will expand out of American border to neighboring coutries like Canada and Mexico and later Europe and Asia.
This wirelss service charge for all users is ZERO under the condition that users surf on the web through and only through Google.
View the web from Google's cache
As Google's has already built a huge network of crawling and caching servers around the globe sending billions of crawlers to cache the whole World Wide Web not weekly, not daily, but every minite and even every second. Nearly all webpages in Google's cache is up-to-date and after the launch of GBrower, which founds its roots in the open source Mozilla Firefox web brower and well integrates with Google's local caching servers, both wireless and broadband users can easily get access to Internet more conviniently and faster than actually connecting to the authentic web sites that they try to link. However, Google web viewers still have to pay a tip for this free lunch: an advertisement banner on the top of the Gbrower.
Online storage and online office software
GBrower will be bundled with open source online editing support office software that users can easily utilize through GBrower toolbar. Easier to use than Microsoft Office and with a bunch of other editing features like storing your documents/webpages/pictures/photos to your GMail account, GBrower online office tool will soon become a hit and a must-have software which converts 90% of the traditional Microsoft Office users to join the Google family. Same as Netscape, the victim of Microsoft's IE bundled operating system approach, Microsoft loses the legal war against Google and witnesses the fall of its major profit generating product--Office2K8.
Cellphone and PDA
Google Telecom
Due to the upgrade of moblie technology, not only can people access GoogleNet from their cellphones and PDAs, but they will use Google's telecom service as well. VoIP technology combined with wireless GoogleNet will eliminate mobile users' complaints about horrific customer service and old school roaming charges.
Google Cellphone
As most of mobile users just use the Internet access feature given by mobile service provide to get access to GoogleNet, Google lauches its own cellphone product--GoogleCell which is well-coupled and fully integrated with wireless GoogleNet. GoogleCell users then will make cheaper phone calls to communicate with each other without any bothering roaming charges.
Television and Movie
Google TV
Google will take its first great leap forward toward media dominance in 2008, when it buys an obscure cable network for $1 billion and transforms it into Google TV. Based on the library of video content including all TV shows and moives in history that Google has been archiving for 10 years is now not only searchable via people's remote controls but also streamable through viewers' HD widescreens.
A price that you cann't refuse
With the support of wireless and broadband network, Google Video will eventually become the online version of Google TV. Viewers can pay only $1 for a package of 100 TV episodes or 50 movies to legally streaming down to their desktops, laptops, cellphones and PDAs. The package will expire in one year. Can Google still make a profit at such a low price? Definitely! After the boom in China online market, Google will have 3 billion subscribers worldwide including 500 million from China alone. By sharing TV revenues with other TV networks like CNN, ABC and Fox and moive industry giants like Paramount, Columbia and Universal Studio for showing their works. Google can still maintain a huge annual profit margin of $10 billion.
Of course, you can also choose the "free lunch" to watch any show in history that you want, all you have to do in return is to sit through just one commercial before each show, and then vote with their remotes on how relevant they found the ad.
Profiling of your watching habbits and behavior
Since viewers had to enter their Google IDs -- the same ones they used for Gmail and other premium services -- the company had already compiled a rich history of their searching and surfing habits.3 If you spent a lot of time looking at cars on eBay, for example, you'd be shown automotive ads the next time you watched Google TV. Between 70 and 80 percent of the revenue from each ad went to the content provider, just as it had on the Web.
Google TV was an instant hit; advertisers, copyright owners, and cable customers all clamored for more. (One of the first casualties was a company called TiVo, which offered a hard-disc TV-recording service that Google's vast remote archive now made redundant.) Searches, ads, and Google TV schedules became more relevant every month. Consumers loved it.
Google Mobile followed in 2009, delivering the same service to cell phones for free. Then the dam broke in 2011, when E Ink and Siemens began mass-manufacturing electronic paper.4 By 2018 the cost of e-paper had fallen close to that of the real thing, and Google began delivering all forms of media wirelessly to our e-papers, sheets hung on living room walls, and thin phones.
For a while, media companies were happy with the generous cut they received from Google's skyrocketing ad revenues. But a new generation of content creators was growing up -- one that did not see why a story should be printed in the New York Times or a movie distributed by Paramount if it was all going to end up on Google anyway.5 So the company offered a very public guarantee to all writers and artists that their works would not be edited in any way by Google (but added that consumers would be allowed to edit and remix them any way they wanted).
In 2020 two Google-based writers won Pulitzer Prizes for reporting and fiction, Google-sponsored bands swept the Grammys, and a Google director walked away with the Oscar for best picture. Almost overnight, New York and Los Angeles had lost their footholds in the media universe. For talent -- and fund-raising presidential candidates -- Mountain View was the new place to be.