Charles H. Ferguson writes, “As some will know, I wrote about the future of Google for the January 2005 issue of Technology Review.

In that article, I argued that the search market will become enormously larger and more diverse than presently, encompassing many forms of personal, internal corporate, for-sale proprietary, and public data stored in a wide variety of systems, ranging from PCs to iPods to corporate servers.

Then I asserted that Google’s leadership position remains fragile, given the absence of barriers to switching and an impending challenge from Microsoft. In particular, the emerging requirement for search interoperability across many data formats and systems, and the diversity of search-related innovation, imply that search engines must become standardized platforms with open interfaces.

I concluded that unless Google created such a platform and made it generally accessible by providing Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to its search engine, it would both lose much of its potential market and render itself vulnerable to a Microsoft attack.

Conversely a proprietary but open architecture based upon public APIs would enable Google to attract more users, create interoperability across many systems, and generate switching costs.”

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