Is Google Becoming Big Brother

Posted • April 15, 2008 • Comments Off

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT), according to their website, is the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company. Thy (Gartner) have began a new study and its potential impact on IT, enterprise businesses, and society in general in the coming years. April 10 at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 in Las Vegas, Gartner Vice President and Gartner Fellow Richard Hunter revealed some of the first data points from this study.

Two of the most interesting points were:

1. The best way to think of Google is as a disruptive technology.
2. Disruptive technologies create big losers and big winners, and one of the biggest losers in the Google disruption could be traditional IT departments.

Google a disruptive technology

This study is being conducted by a team of 15 Gartner researchers, led by Hunter, and the full report will be published mid-2008. The title of Hunter’s presentation at ITxpo was “What Does Google Know?”

Hunter also stated that Google will know a lot more about what’s sold on the Web if Google Checkout takes off, and could soon know a lot about medicine and health patterns if Google Health Records gets adopted.

“Their infrastructure has unprecedented scale,” said Hunter, “and what is even more impressive is their ability to connect vast quantities of information… Google is sitting on the biggest pile of information that has ever been collected in the world.”

The reason why Gartner chose to characterize Google as a disruptive technology and not just an Internet search engine company is because of the the ambitions that Google has for all of that data and the potential impact that those ambitions could have on the technology industry.

Hunter also said “We believe Google’s information security will be a political issue worldwide by the end of the year in 2010.”

Not only does this affect the IT departments but the big question, is Google destined to become Big Brother?

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