Google - the future of monopolized internet?

The GIANT of the internet! Whats left that they dont have yet? Its obvious that search engine is their most powerful tool. But they are constantly introducing us with new products and innovative ideas, and also acquiring anything that has the potential to be large.

Assume you are a normal internet user
What do you normally do at home or office?
- You search the internet (search engine),
- Read latest news (News),
- Send emails (Gmail),
- Manage Documents and Spreadsheets (Docs),
- Schedule your appointments (Calendar),
- Chat online (Talk),
- Make new friends (Orkut),
- Share videos (YouTube),
- Upload photos (Picasa),
- Create blogs (Blogger),
- Publish blog feeds (FeedBurner),
- Get location info (Maps and Earth),
- Read feeds from your favourite sites (Reader),
- Advertise your product (Adwords ),
- Earn money from ads (Adsense),
- Get stock info (Finance),
the list will never end!

They are also coming with a much awaited product (still a rumour) - your online hard disk (often called gDrive or Google Drive). There are already a few free storage services online including xDrive (by AOL ), and Box.net. Google has always introduced us with rich web applications with a very easy to use interface - and this too is going to be one of their top products undoubtedly.

Acquisitions
Whenever it comes to acquisitions, they are the first you could possibly think of. They bought YouTube (video sharing site), Blogger (the one I am using for my blog), Feedburner (publishing feeds), DoubleClick (online advertisement), GrandCentral (one phone number for all your phones), and hundreds more that we dont even know yet. They are also spending millions of dollars on Mozilla (Firefox) Foundation for the default homepage spot.

Opponents
There was a time when we thought Yahoo! or MSN will probably go ahead of Google - but no more. May be it was possible if Yahoo accpeted Microsoft's offer - but instead Yahoo teamed up with Google for an advertisement deal! If there is anyone existing in the market that can fight Google - its Facebook (Microsoft is one of the shareholders of this popular social network). I dont see any other website that has the potential to be as large as Google.

Facebook's main weapon is its platform for web developers. They allowed third-party developers to create applications that let the users experience thousands of applications right from facebook. And Google then came up with the idea of OpenSocial (Myspace, Hi5, and other popular social networks are already using this platform) - a common api for developing applications for multiple social networks - to let third-parties develop applications for them. This is a good news for developers since they now dont have to code in different mark-up languages for different social networks.

Monopoly?
I am not saying that having a larger share of the market is bad, especially when you are providing such quality services for free. But the question is how much secure is it to have all our information hosted by Google? Is the future of internet going to be monopolized by Google?