mediajunk

Topix.net speculates on why Google launched Gmail. The post is fairly technical but the basic idea is that, in building the world's most powerful search engine, the guys at Google have created what is perhaps the world's largest proprietary, general-purpose computer, so it is inevitable that they should try to find other uses for it: "Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer ... They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month ... It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application. ... This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?" As to the latter question, Paul Ford has written a fictitious, speculative "short feature from a business magazine published in 2009," which examines how Google got to its postion of being the "world's single largest marketplace."