…Now that I’m an IT guy, I spend an awful lot of my time thinking about the things those letters stand for: Information and Technology. As I was sitting this afternoon (reading a book on ASP.NET security during my free time, no less) I started thinking about an imperceptible role shift that might be occuring in the industry.

I can remember the dark ages of the Internet (around 1994). My Tandy 386 was still my platform of choice and I was just beginning to see the merits of Windows 3.1 . Then something happened. Windows 95 was released upon the world. Computing for the non-technical, non-business related masses became, for the first time, an attainable goal. The marketing machine which embodied the Microsoft Corporation at that time was staggering, and soon, people began to joke that Microsoft would one day “take over the world”. Then came the lawsuits.

But, since then, the dot-com boom has come and gone and the Internet is reaching a sort-of post-adolescence. People are trusting the web with their personal information which has given rise to, not just convenient but almost necessary, Internet banking. Web standards have given the average web designer the tools and environment needed to make the web look nice. Bandwidth costs are dropping; gone are the days of dedicated content/service providers like AOL and Prodigy. It’s a new world so to speak and Microsoft, still a giant hulking beast of a company with fingers in every pot and vestigial bully image, is still a key player. However, any bite left in the company is being softened by the opportunities of Open Source software and an ever increasing pressure from non-corporate entities to play nice.

Amidst all of this activity, few people seem to notice the new giant…Google. Incorporated in 1998, Google soon grew to a large multi-national corporation offering more than just search. A small selecton of their most popular services and products includes: Google Maps, Google Answers, Google Alerts, Froogle, Google Mobile, Google News, the Google Toolbar, Google Earth, GMail, and also…Blogger. You could guess that Blogger is the on-line service used to create this feed.

Question: Why has no one commented on the emergence of this fresh, young Corporate Beast?

Answers (choose your favorite):

1. They have.

2. Nobody cares. The services Google renders are just that good.

3. The large, colorful, and friendly letters that spell out the company name do a good job of keeping the public from panicking.

4. The average person (non techno-geek, non-educated technology consumer, non-person with half a brain) has no clue that Google Inc. is anything more than a way to search the Internet. Heck, I’ll bet that some of them think that Google is the Intenet(see this).

Whatever the choice, the point is that Google is big, and it got that way fast, and it’s not stopping. I just wanted to make sure that all of my readers were well aware of that fact.

• Google’s history. A very intersting read.

Update:
Ironically, I found out soon after writing this post that today, September 27th, is Google’s Seventh Birthday. Spooky.

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