Looking back on Google from the year 2026

Ashton Mills
Google Earth
3 December, 2026

Dear Google,

Great and mighty information overlord, keeper of the sanctified and searched-for bits, innovator of information networking, and glorious displayer of the Earth for all to see.

It's been quite a journey, hasn't it? All the way from the garage, a time when dreams and passion were the currency of success. And boy, did it succeed.

I mean, since your complete domination of the world, where upon the US government was replaced with Politics And Democracy 2.0, sans evil, the world has been a better place.

Granted, my family can now look me up any time of the day, and tell if I'm really sick and unable to make the lunch or just playing my PS6, but still for the most part the glorious Ubiquitous Information age has changed the world completely. We are after all, if nothing else, information sponges.

I can find topical stories of my interest among a billion sources in seconds. I can vote, influence government, gain stardom, and argue inanely with faceless people on forums from my FruitSalad (Blackberry on steroids) while my car drives me to work. I can even go shopping for new gear and buy it online from the comfort of my toilet.

And all because information is as its best when the dissemination and accessibility to it is freed. Or, sometimes, mediated for profit.

Sure, we had the naysayers. The 'privacy' groups and the RFID hippies, but they couldn't see the dream the way you could. Information, and the access to it, is power. It's just that fine line between trust and abuse, and moral malleability of the definition of 'evil' in the 'Don't be evil' charter.

After all, setting out to catalogue humanity in its entirety from all formats, and to be the custodian of that data, is a solar system sized responsibility. And who watches the watchers?

That happy medium between the personal and the global wasn't easy to get, either. It took a while to convince the masses to place trust in a centralised resource, in what became known as the Earth Store, where one's personal information could be tapped into from anywhere in the globe.

However, the quantum megabit encryption abated much of that. Especially considering the only machine capable of cracking it in any reasonable rate was the Google Great Machine, the real life equivalent of Orac, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.

The big issue with Earth Store was it still left the question of who and what had access to it. Information is power, and governments are power personified, so you always had to walk the tightrope between serving the users, and serving the powers that be.

Which decision was best for Google, or for people, or for partners? No one envied you this choice, but in many ways you chose it – that’s what you get for logging everything everyone ever does online.

The Google Desktop OS was a good move, though not a surprise. It was a given that you would turn your engineers to building a tailored Linux distro with the Google branding, interacting directly with Google Web services for applications, remote storage, and the 'access your life anywhere' ideal.

It turned PCs into just Cs, removed the personal nature, because your desktop was anywhere you were as long there was a link – even on mobile devices. And of course, these days there’s always a link. Even in the bathroom.

But back to the Google Great Machine, the trillion node wonder, the Google Gaia. The epitome of the Google philosophy made manifest. Google OS desktops and machines the world over, right down to handheld, pocket held, and implanted devices all nodes in a planet-wide super computer. It was inevitable, but no one was better equipped to take us there than Google.

The best part was the collaboration it enabled, and that anyone who donated resources got to tap into the Great Machine and reap its benefits in return.

Yep, it’s been quite a history. And now the news that you are embarking on bending space and time is both welcome and expected.What took you so long? But as the Googlenaughts jump from exploring the metaverse to the universe, here's to remembering that journey from your roots, from the dreams and the passions that started it all, from that humble garage.

It’s scary to think that back in 2007, it could have so easily gone the other way. Governments and security agencies lobbying their own cause for the vast volumes of data Google had already amassed. The opportunities to do the right thing, or the wrong thing, that so frequently popped up.

What a relief that history records that Google didn't become evil after all, that it held to its mantra and, in the process, demonstrated a better way of doing business that always put people first.

Here's to you, big G!

 

Skynet: Thanks to Google, this tragedy was averted. Source: Sony