[FoRK] Google buys Keyhole

[J. Andrew Rogers]

Finally.

I've been sitting on this story for weeks, and I was looking forward to
this morning because there is a lot about this deal that is worth
talking about, particularly with regard to how this fits into Google's
portfolio.  Even though I knew about the deal, I have no clue as to the
reasoning why Google bought them.  All the talk about them being a "map
provider" is a bit of nonsense, since Keyhole is a hell of a lot more
than a map provider.  If they wanted maps they could have gone to the
source, since it isn't like Keyhole creates their own map data --
Keyhole is more of a data integrator.

Salient points:

- Keyhole is fussy Windows-only client software (something that won't
change soon), which appears to be a departure from Google's normally
web-centric applications.

- Keyhole can consume some serious bandwidth, and isn't really something
that will scale to average home use (in many different ways) without
wholesale re-architecting of the system.

- Keyhole has terabytes of very interesting databases, many of which are
not public.  For example, the US DoD has become fond of using Keyhole to
process all sorts of reconnaissance, intelligence, and battle planning
data.  And more Federal agencies and foreign governments are moving to
do the same.



I've maintained for some time that Google is very aggressively trying to
position themselves as a very deep data-mining operation, and are
facilitating that by arranging that as much data as possible flow
through their systems.  I've stated in the past that they have the
potential to be super-evil, if only because of the access they are being
granted to vast ranges of data, which many people seem more than happy
to grant.  From that perspective, I find the above points worrisome.

It will be very interesting to see what they do with this.

cheers,

j. andrew rogers

_______________________________________________
FoRK mailing list
http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork

----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]