The Art of War

“Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting..”, using the old Sun Tzu chinesse principle, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is taking the lead over Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) by extending the already universal Google search algorithm to the common PC desktop (still dominated by Microsoft). With this new tool, Google enables everyone, with just a browser, to gain control over the large amount of files that we already have in our computers. Desktop search tools are not new, some solutions has been out there for some time: Copernic, X1, and Microsoft Explorer search companion, among many others. But now we got Google that is serious about leading this market niche and here is why:

• Pros: easy to use interface that is integrated into http://www.google.com/, enable index and search for any type of files including: doc, ppt, xls, txt, pdf, jpg, gif, mp3, Outlook mail files, web history files, favorites, AOL IM, etc., offers options to exclude directories, and the best of all..it is free;
• Cons: security concerns because it is so easy to index and search that your entire computer becomes transparent to other users if you don’t set up minimum security controls; although Google says that they will provide password protection sometime soon. Does not provide thumbnail views for jpg and other graphic formats, it is not possible get more than 10 results per page, and to order results based on other criteria such as files size, type, etc.

Having said that, Google Desktop Search (beta) will be the new killer application on the block, and along with Gmail, the new 1-Gigabyte free mail service originally introduced with the slogan “Don’t throw anything away” and “Search, don’t sort”, are about to set five star prospects for the company. Recent news indicate that for mail Yahoo, Lycos and Spaymac are rising their offers to 1-Gigabyte too, while some IT specialists claim that Google has been giving 1-Terabyte to some users.

The “Storage War” seems to have no limits, and because it depends only on technology limitations and costs per MB we will see storage capacity to grow sky-high for services like e-mail; instead, the real challenge in the “Search Engine Wars” is to set up a new paradigm for the final user, how to search and retrieve contents already lost in our large array of computers and storage media that we use everyday. The most critical issue now, is how to give sense, order and context to the huge amount of information and files, mapping content to ideas and categories by making the computer work and display information not in the linear old-fashioned and folder-like way, but in the "n-dimensional" space that is suitable and unique for our particular minds and thinking process. In few words, the question is: how can computers become transparent extensions of our minds and languages?