This is an end-of-year post; it is highly speculative and conjectural, intentionally provocative.  As such, it is almost assuredly dead wrong, and in more ways than I will ever imagine. Its focus is on the shape of network information services, and the firms that provide them. 

After a year awaiting, and then digesting, the Google Books Search settlement proposal, and with a crash of the world capitalist economy, it is worth while to consider what might emerge in a post-Google world -- a world in which Google might not be a dominant firm.  In other words, what might advances in the commodification of networked information obtain beyond Google? 

In the last year, Google has aggregated an increasing amount of content: continuing its massive book digitization program, certainly; but also inking deals with magazines; augmenting news and topical information sources; and acquiring large scale data sets.  In addition, it has striven to mine and integrate these data to generate ever more compelling services against which to serve advertising, and therefore obtain revenue.  It has even engendered a major new platform - Android - in the mobile space, hoping to extend the reach and expand the ubiquity of its services.  In short, Google is increasingly building applications that are reliant upon the computational enhancement of its growing index, reaped from the harvest of more and more content fields.  

This index, notably, will increasingly become more and more difficult to work with as Google attempts to integrate ever more diverse content: web pages, and journal articles, and books, and images, and videos, and datasets -- these are not like each other, and in a sickening analogue to those of us who have wrestled with metasearch, Google's efforts to integrate these content types will become ever more forced, at the same time the engineering will become ever more clever.   It is long past elegance. 

The problem with Google's trajectory -- building ever more complex and compelling services from an ever growing agglomeration of content -- is that there is ever more content.  That content will grow at a rate that will - which must - outpace Google's ability to acquire it.  In part content grows out of reach because of scale; in part, because more and more data will be derived from content; latent, invisible to harvest.  And as have so many industries before it, Google will learn that it is racing onwards toward a darker place.  Content is an end-game.

Already, the scale of Google's platform, a critical competitive asset today, is slowly succumbing to the status of an industrial commodity; Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Google itself have recognized that this raw gathering of circuitry, cooling, and power is simple, albeit expensive, infrastructure.  Yet, notably, the income generated by the power of the dynamo observed by Henry Adams at the World's Fair in Chicago did not rest dominantly with the power utility; the dynamo built a different economy. 

In a world with ever more content, the capacity to treat content as data increases in the competitive environment, and in that trend, the ability to build new services yields to an extravagance of sources.   As Google's own activities are demonstrating to a growing legion of future competitors, building services by integrating content, and deriving useful (monetizable) information across them, is something that can ultimately be achieved without discrimination.

The reach of computer science easily expands its grasp to hold innovation's new scope, and Google thus manages to facilitate its own ultimate undoing, as technology firms must.  The analogy is twisted and deformed, but the Google of today arguably occupies the role of the integrated steel mills of yesterday; its manufacturing processes produce the scrap that the lean and innovative mini-mills of the future will melt and forge to develop new markets at price points unavailable to incumbent organizations. 

Ultimately, Google's master index is just data.  And the ability of new firms to build applications premised on Google's index and its base level services, combined with the ever-widening seas of content that generate ever more sophisticated and semantically laden index data, will shape a new generation of firms that dis-intermediate Google from the users that drive their revenue.  Advertising will fall into ever more refined and targeted niches, serving needs higher up an evolving services food chain; as the ecosystem of these advanced services grows, the raw steel that is an index becomes shaped into ever more useful and ever more assumed specialized products. 

These markets are immature now; it is easy to claim all will start and end with search.   But I think it more likely that all will start and end with data, and as our index data become the richest wellspring of new services, we will begin to imagine a new way of framing our understanding of networked information, and our ability to interact with it. 

Happy holidays.