Google: the United States of Data

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across something called Google Big Query and it has changed my view on data. Up until that point I had seen data (and Big Data) as something both incredibly important and incredibly remote and inaccessible (at least for an arts graduate). However, when I checked-out Google Big Query I suddenly caught a glimpse of a future where an arts graduate can become a data scientist.

Google Big Query is a classic Google play in that it takes something difficult and complicated and rehabilitates it into the world of the everyday. I can’t pretend I really understood how to use Google Big Query, but I got the strong sense that I wasn’t a million miles away from getting that understanding – especially if GBQ itself became a little more simplified.

And that presents the opportunity to create a world where the ability to play with data is a competence that is available to everyone. Google Big Query could become a tool as familiar to the business world as PowerPoint or Excel. Data manipulation and interrogation will become a basic business competence, not just a rarefied skill.

The catch, of course, is that this opportunity is only available to you once you have surrendered your data to the Google Cloud (i.e. to Google) and paid for an entry visa. As it shall at the base of the Statue of Googlability that marks the entry point to the US of D:

“Give me your spreadsheets, your files,
Your huddled databases yearning to breathe free,
The wretched data refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the officeless, ppt-tossed, to me:
I lift my algorithms beside the (proprietary) golden door.”

And the rest, as they say, shall be history (and a massive future revenue stream).

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