Whenever I try to figure out Google's next steps, I first make a very big assumption, one I wouldn't dare make about any other company: Google is, literally, perfectly smart.
Is that too strong? How about, Google is as smart as any company is going to get. Literally.
Of course they recruit the brightest PhD's, Eric Schmidt is a superstar, and have a stock worth $500. While all superneat factoids, this is not even near the ol' center of the server farm.
To begin to appreciate the perfect rationality of Google, look to dear Dr. Leary, who wrote, "The only smart thing to do is to get smarter". Or to Kant or Hegel, who each in his own weird and convoluted way, implies that (Get ready!) "The Mind that Knows Itself as being a Mind that Knows How Minds Can Know Themselves is, more or less, Godly."
FTW you say? No problem. Just chain those ideas together in the context of Google and you get this:
A. The smartest thing to do (ever) is to always become smarter and smarter.
B. The smartest way to become the Smartest Thing is to compel others into simply giving you as much data as possible in the form of useful content (in Google's case, via submissions of URL's to the index, uploads to Youtube, joinings of Gmail, etc.).
C. Google actively knows A. and B. are true
D. Google actively knows they are doing A. and B. as A. and B. (that is, they self-consciously understand the fundamental-and-grand essence of their undertaking)
Seriously, not only does Google provide and leverage the most useful service conceivable (the organized accessibility of as much information as possible), but they are wholly aware of the sheer logical beauty of themselves doing what they are in the way they are.
On all levels, its smart; in fact, it's the very essence, the highest incarnation, of smartness.
