Since everyone is talking about GMail these days, why should I be left behind? :) So here’s my two cents.

After a long long wait, Google is finally going for its IPO later this year. Following the company’s release of its financial report for last year, Google filed the IPO. And interestingly, there were some unexpected clauses in their initial announcement. For instance, the IPO has been designed in such a way that Brin and Page will still own majority stock of the company. AFAIK there are going to be two kinds of shares — the “less” powerful ones and the “more” powerful ones. Don’t ask me the technicalities, since I don’t know.

Google has also released a 7 page letter for investors, outlining Google’s plans and policies. Google makes it clear in the letter that they are not going to plan for short term benefits and that the investors should be aware of this. They say that Google was a private company, and it will carry on much of its values and traditions as it becomes a public company. Bottomline: they don’t want risk seeking short term investors looking to make quick money to invest. They’re going to aim for long term profits, and long term benefits.

That apart, the arrival of GMail has made the situation quite delicate. Clearly, Google had intended to make a splash with GMail and help them position themselves strongly for the upcoming IPO. Perhaps less anticipated was the reaction from the media and the internet community in general.

While there have been several mixed responses, there are a large number of people out there who are lobbying strongly against GMail. Most of the opposition is uncomfortable with the fact that GMail will be data mining all the personal emails of the users to place “intelligent” ads in users inboxes.

Controversies apart, at this point, Google is also at a philosophical and technical turning point. Considering the fact that Google has the world’s largest data mining and indexing cluster at its disposal, and a behemoth of raw data collected over the years that tells them what people like and dislike, love and hate, shop and sell; the future certainly looks interesting.

Over the years Google has worked hard to make its cluster work as efficiently as possible. Getting 15000+ machines to work together in a nice manner is not an easy task. Google had to hack around a lot of things, and eventually they ended up customizing a lot of the tools and utilities in the commodity boxes that they use to help things out. As things became bigger and more complex, they started doing bigger things like file systems and OS level stuff.

So there’s Google — enormous data bank, huge cluster running customized software. The big question is, what are they going to do with it next? A visit to Google labs will give you the tip of the iceberg. There’s probably much much more going on behind the curtains. Is Google working on their own OS? Who knows, and I won’t be surprised if they are. After all, none of the operating systems out there are really customized for a cluster the scale that Google has. Infact, it would probably be a good idea to invest in R&D in that area.

If you sit and think for a minute, Google has really become phenominal. I’m sure this is as true in academia as in industry, that if Google were to take down their search engine for even a few hours, it will cause massive chaos, frustration and financial losses!! Imagine wielding that kind of power. Is Google taking control of our lives? I think its a phase, and it will pass. But its definitely not happening in the next few years, and you can expect to become more and more dependent on search technology in the near future. Beyond that, wait and watch…