Via David Weinberger’s JOHO:
“(Co-founder) Larry (Page) and I were sharing a can of Red Bull and some Power Bars last week and, you know, just sort of riffing on new ideas,” explained Brin. “And I was, like, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if all the people who used Google had their own language to speak’ and Larry was like ‘no way!’ and I was like ‘way!’ and we high-fived and agreed that we’d think about it some more.”
Already slack-jawed at the company’s pace of innovation in recent months, the financial community was rocked once again by the news of yet another new market for Google. “I have no reason to believe that Googlish won’t become the dominant human language form within the next 12-15 years,” said Peter Weismuller, analyst at Sequoia Capital Partners, a leading Google investor. “Our projections show it overtaking Spanish by 2008 and trailing only Mandarin Chinese and Hindi by 2010.”
New York Times technology reporter John Markoff sees the Google move into human language as a logical next move. “Google has clearly become instrumental and indispensable in the conduct of human affairs,” Markoff explained. “Its emergence has had far more impact on mankind than the discovery of fire or the inventions of either the printing press or the steam engine. It’s only natural that Google would now look to leave its mark on the spoken word.”
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