EPIC 2014 challenges us to consider what may be the most vigorous and fervent battle between the two biggest IT companies in the world, Google and Microsoft. In the plot Google merges with Amazon and consolidates all its power into the "Google Grid" a universal platform for storing and publishing multimedia information. This plot illustrates an apocalyptic scenario in which the two superpowers of the internet wage war with one another to aggregate and deliver news on the internet in a customized, personalized, efficient way. In a way the fear factor of this video instills the notion that EPIC evolves in a cancerous way, it aggrandizes by consolidating companies and features such as Amazon's A9 search engine slowly eliminating the competition and monopolizing the internet and incorporating it into the grid. Eventually, news agencies are forced off the web because they cannot compete with Google News' unparalleled diversification and limitless options. Google uses the RSS Feed to consolidate all the articles from all the news agencies into one forum where it is sorted to your custom and personalized taste.
In the video Google slowly becomes the internet offering features such as shopping, IM, email, news, weather etc... into one format. In essence Google slowly casts its grip around the world wide web eliminating its competitors one by one, it teams up with Amazon to edge out Microsoft who fights fervently to retain some sort of technological and innovative edge over Google but loses to Google's newest products: the Grid and EPIC. EPIC is Google's doomsday device, the Atomic Bomb of its war to permanently end the slow and painful death of competing companies. Google unleashes EPIC to custom tailor all news to its audience constructing news from excerpts of information on the web, through EPIC it forces NYTimes to take down its website. At the end of the movie the narration ends ominously with "Perhaps there was another way".
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1 comments:
You are perfectly right! People should be aware of these implications.
One thing I noticed is that the video really focused and emphasized on how Google would dominate the mass media in the future. It's interesting that the footage doesn't exclusively describe Microsoft. My guess is that EPIC 2004 is trying to say that Google would eventually be the monopoly of the internet.
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