Who’s afraid of Google?

I was passing through WHSmith at Heathrow airport yesterday on my way back to San Francisco when the latest BusinessWeek magazine caught my eye. The cover story addresses fears that Google may be getting a little too big for its boots.

The timing was quite neat. Only a couple of days ago I blogged about a possible IT future dominated by Google’s technology (see below), and drew comparisons with IBM. The BusinessWeek article does the same. However, it talks of Google “building out of tens of thousands of server computers around the world that handle quadrillions of bytes of data”, which goes slightly over my tongue-in-cheek suggestion that everything could be done with five (although, to be fair, I didn’t say how big they had to be!)