I had this thought well over a year ago, when realising that when Google started buying backhall bandwidth, it had some major plans to shake up the how the provision of connectivity should work.
Ewan from Mobile Industry Review found me in a corner with a beer at Swedish Beers and got me to talk for about 15 minutes.. most of which was rather sensitive, but this bit got published..
MIR Show – Week 45 – Mobile Operators & Google from Mobile Industry Review on Vimeo.
Google isn’t that interested in providing every service itself, as long as it gets to sit between the remaining ones. They will happily let other people do the really hard parts, usually involving hardware. Android is a good example of this, Voice is another, Chrome OS is the next. Everyone else gets to compete, while Google sits in the middle.
It doesn’t even want to build it’s own social network. Why? because there’s the internet. So again it builds tools in-between the parts everyone else has made, tools such as OpenSocial.
Whether or not this turns out to be a good thing?.. Well the future isn’t that far away..