Business owners and residents in Kansas City, Missouri, must have been very happy with their new internet connection choice provided by Google Fiber since Q4 2012. As the first city selected for Google Fiber Network, for about the same monthly fee as their past often single-selection-only cable or ISP service, now they can get 100 times faster connection speed (in gigabytes). Since then, Google has been aggressively expanding its Google Fiber to many other cities. Many more cities are eagerly waiting.
This is just one of the examples of the recent innovations by Google. It happens in the very traditional telecommunication broadband service sector which have been tightly controlled by a few large and long-time businesses for years and where innovations have been slow.
Since the start of the company, Google has never been lacking innovations in its products or services, but its most profound one in recent years, per TriStrategist, is not in the latest smart wearables, Android-related products or map services, but the unique expansion of wide-area wireless access since 2013 in the remote terrains of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, where for so many years the costs have never been justified for the wires to be laid by telecom companies or poor local governments. By Google Blimps, satellites (Google’s recent Skybox purchase may add to the toolbox) and other locally suitable mechanisms for these remote areas (MSFT is said to be in this endeavor in some way as well), billions of people may soon expect to be connected to the internet and to the rest of the world.
Yes, future commercial gains for Google are in the middle, but the implications of such moves are far more significant – bringing down barriers of information access, promoting health, education and businesses, propagating democracy and social progress, reducing poverty and improving equality… It finally gives a modern and perhaps the most effective way to unleash the human potentials and productivities of the billions of people in these disadvantaged areas in the world.
Combining Google Fiber and Blimps moves, Google delivered disruptive innovations head-on to the long-tradition telecomm and ISP service market. In an urgent defensive move, besides fighting against Net Neutrality in court, global 30+ telecom companies, refusing to be reduced to “dumb pipes” (in their own word) in the new cloud and internet reality, came up a comprehensive counter strategy to try to channel the web and data access through their proposed global NFV (Network Function Virtualization) Network by ETSI standards, but their position and strategy could be misdirected this time.
Not all disruptive innovations can eventually succeed, just as many good inventions only stayed in history as fun ideas. However the true prevailing strength of a disruptive innovation and its willing acceptance by the society, many times are not because it is simply technologically superior or commercially appealing, but because it also contains a certain element of conscience: a conscience of following the natural flow of the way (as described in the “Tao” in ancient Chinese philosophy classic Tao Te Ching), a conscience for the greater good of mankind and the progress of civilizations at large.