The December BusinessWeek cover article is about Google and their Cloud computing project that will make Google the worlds largest universally accessible supercomputer.

What does this mean for us marketers and the next version of the web? Access to the Google Could is being limited to universities and research needs. Ring any bells? ARPANET anyone? This approach is earily similar to the work of ARPA (which later became DARPA) and the origin of the Internet. Of course, the Internet quickly moved beyond universities and was explored as a business/commerce channel and over time became the bubble of web 1.0.

Every day we are becoming a more digital and data-driven society. The new bubble of web 2.0 is accelerating the pace via emails, digital photos, text messaging, social communities, Internet enabled mobile devices, blogs, etc. And those are just our personal data footprints. The corporate footprint is massive, storing financial systems, CRM systems, procurement systems all the way down to product RFID tagging. The amount of data that is generated on any given day is staggering.

Will the Google Cloud provide corporations a previously inaccessible level of computing power to find deeper meaning in all that data they’ve been collecting on us over the years? Can the current method of strategic thinking (human intuition, knowledge and judgment) be replaced with data and algorithms? Have we reached a point where important decisions are not based on our best judgment but instead on how an algorithm renders answers from massive amounts of data, yours and others?

To me it’s a fascinating question that will help define the next evolution of online marketing, design and development. Rather than relying on brand reviews, heuristics or typical market research and assessments, marketers will one day look to your personal data footprint to determine strategies and tactics with the horsepower and and numbers to back it up.

I’ve obviously asked way more questions than I’ve answered. Someone smarter than me will need to provide those. As I was writing this post one example keeps coming back to me. In Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Blink, he details how doctors currently determine if a patient is having a heart attack. With severe episodes it’s obvious, but in certain cases the patient may be in the very early stages and have only a subtle set of symptoms that are hard to diagnosis.

One emergency room doctor wanted to find a better way to diagnose these cases and used a data driven approach to the problem. Based on his analytical assessments of previous cases he crunched all the numbers and narrowed the symptoms down to four facts within a decision tree. Needless to say doctors were not happy with the notion of having such an important decision that relies on their experience and training being taken away from them and replaced by a simple formula. But, the results from the small amount of hospitals where he was able to test his formula where shockingly clear. The new decision tree method was more accurate by a considerable margin.

Chalk one up for the power of data.

Andy Sackmann, Client Services