At Google IO’s keynote this year, the biggest announcement was the unification of Android and Chrome services. I’m going to make a quick prediction of the future of Google’s services.
By this time next year, Google will announce that Android OS will be fully integrated into Chrome. Just like Google Glass extends Android experience on the phone. Chrome on computers will be able to extend the Android experience.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Google eventually rebrands Android to be Chrome, this would be about 3-7 years down the line. I’m leaning towards the 2-3 year mark. They may even combine both of the names to one integrated product name.
Have you noticed that many Android features have been getting integrated into Chrome? Slowly, but surely, Google’s Chrome browser will be able to offer all of the services that Android offers.
Larry Page during the keynote also quickly talked about unification of writing code once and having it run on many different platforms.
When it was announced a few years ago that Google would make laptops and netbooks, many people (including myself) thought the operating system would be Android. But, instead, Google chose to integrate just Chrome to become Chromium. That was great at a time where speed and power mattered and they could easily distinguish themselves in those regards. Speed and batter-saving will always be important, but they won’t always be the attributes that separate devices and brands. Now, it’s time to think about what is the distinguishing factor going to be when everybody has ultra-fast boot/startup times and ultra-efficient operating systems. App availability and features will always be important also, but it’s distinguishing factor will go away as cross-development tools get more and more developed and easier to work with.
As I’m writing this, I’m going to mention some more ideas that came to mind that the far future holds. These ideas may be a little far-fetched, but I like writing about them anyways.
Unfortunately, I see content creation as just a phase in our human social lives. Currently, the trend is still going up. Many cool new services and features are being offered that make it too easy to create content. Eventually, it will go down. I’d say we’re about 30% through the bell curve. As content creation starts to go down, content absorption will still be going up for a little while longer, then it will also go down. This will be the point in time when people learn that they don’t need to learn everything and can just access it in the computer connected to them. Our society as a whole will seemly get smarter and smarter. There will be no need for content creation or absorption at this point. Parallel to what I have mentioned so far, I imagine our world to become more data-centric as a bell-curve also. We are about 1-5% through this bell curve. Many more people will want the ability to track themselves: how they exercise, run, how they sleep, and how they learn. The later being the biggest/greatest one. As people learn all this amazing stuff about themselves, algorithms will learn the habits of the many and will soon be able to apply metrics automatically and there will be no more use to collect data about oneself because there will be nothing else for them to learn.
– Danial Goodwin -
Think. Do. Learn.
