What to Expect from Google in the Next 10 Years

Google turns the Big 10 years old on Sept. 7 and there are no shortage of stories about what the company has achieved in a decade, as well as comparisons to how Google fared compared to Microsoft's first 10 years.

As the leading search engine and the best executor of search advertising on the Web, Google earns about $16.5 billion in annual sales, its stock sells at $450 and the company boasts a market cap of $142 billion.

Not bad, right? Fine, but we at eWEEK are more interested in what Google will do in the next 10 years. Come along for the ride...

The Chrome Wars

The most obvious place to start is with Google's Chrome Web browser, which took 1 percent of the browser market within its first day of release.

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What will happen if more and more people choose Chrome over IE? There is no easy answer to that question. Media and bloggers like to say Chrome will break Windows but the fact is that you can't get to the browser without having Windows or Linux boot up your machine.

Here's what I believe. Instead of going to Microsoft Office for word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software, users will increasingly go first to Chrome on Windows, Linux and Mac machines, and then to Gmail, and other Google Apps, such as Docs.

This will happen in the consumer sector, but thanks to new apps such as Google Video for businesses and increased reliability from Google's cloud infrastructure, businesses will begin to live on the Web, too.

This is already starting in small businesses but medium and large enterprises will start to adopt Google within 10 years. Internet Explorer will be rendered irrelevant as Chrome becomes the new IE and Google Apps becomes the new Office.

What will happen to Microsoft? Microsoft will revitalize Windows by battling back with Live Mesh and will look to pursue the mobile space, but as Microsoft Watch's Joe Wilcox noted, the software giant is well behind in this area.

Chrome Comes to Android

Chrome is a hit, but Google co-founder Sergey Brin has also said Chrome will slip into Android.

Chrome and Android share the same WebKit rendering engine. With Google bringing the speedy JavaScript virtual machine from Chrome to Android, expect blazing fast access to Web applications.

In the next few years, Google will successfully map the Chrome desktop experience to Android phones, which start to challenge Apple's iPhone for quality user experience and mobile market share. A two-horse race for mobile Web consumption ensues between Google and Apple.

Nokia and other phone makers will continue to make phones but their software will be supplanted by Chrome and other Google Web apps.

Microsoft Windows Mobile market share begins to decline. Users will continue to access Chrome and Google Search and Apps from Android phones.

The conversation around Google's search ad business on the desktop remains strong, but Google begins to look less like a one-trick pony as Chrome and Android open up more mobile ad opportunities for Google.