A Boston Globe article on why Google makes everyone else nervous:

Research firms are only now beginning to take the measure of the company's influence. A recent study by Outsell showed that 80 percent of advertisers now use the Internet, with the adoption rate projected to hit 90 percent by 2008. While search engine advertising is expected to increase 26 percent this year, with Google raking in the largest share, spending is projected to grow 2 percent for newspaper and magazine ads and 2.4 percent for radio and television ads.

Research firms are only now beginning to take the measure of the company's influence. A recent study by Outsell showed that 80 percent of advertisers now use the Internet, with the adoption rate projected to hit 90 percent by 2008. While search engine advertising is expected to increase 26 percent this year, with Google raking in the largest share, spending is projected to grow 2 percent for newspaper and magazine ads and 2.4 percent for radio and television ads.

Similarly, the Google effect has reduced Internet service companies -- who'd once hoped to be gateways to the Internet that profited from Internet services -- to ``pipe companies" that build networks and charge businesses and consumers for access.

And, Google's e-mail, calendar, and word-processing products are pioneering an ad-supported Internet delivery model that threatens the desktop licensing model of Microsoft and other proprietary software companies, and could appeal to their ``enterprise" market of businesses and other organizations. Aiding Google's efforts to deliver robust software on the Internet, and faster search results, is a worldwide network of between 300,000 and 1 million servers, according to analysts' estimates; Google itself declines to specify its number of servers.

In addition to some of the issues mentioned in this article one of the big, big issues that companies like Google should be worried about if they seriously want these applications to take off is privacy rights and protecting individuals from unwarranted search and scanning. Trusting the company that's storing your life online is something that we all ought to take very seriously (and really it can't just be based on trust. We need an infrastructure that updates traditional protections in light of electronic storage and guarantees them as we are guaranteed protections in our homes and other properties).