A couple of recent stories about Google have caught my eye, if only because they each carry an object lesson for users, and vendors, about the way the world is changing from the application of technology and to the delivery of services. What is more, together they show that companies like Google understand the trends and changes better than most of the vendors.

For example, Apache would be high on many lists of software choices for running a Web Server, yet its market share has started to drop away despite solid growth – 5 per cent a month - in new websites. Its share is down from over 60 per cent at the beginning of this year to under 48 per cent now which is odd, especially as many of the traditional ISPs would be amongst the most likely customers for Apache.

So where has the market growth gone for website services? It appears the answer is the social computing sites such as MySpace, Microsoft Live and Google Blogger. OK, it is fair to observe that there is likely to be a good deal of difference between the website needs and aspirations of a major global enterprise and an archetypal `spotty oik’. The former is unlikely to find too much in the way of suitable capability or resources available from these types of company, right now at least.

But the history of the IT business has already demonstrated that the technologies and functionality first developed for the personal/consumer/social marketplace – from high resolution graphics PCs onwards – usually end up somewhere in the knitting pattern that is enterprise infrastructure. The key thing with this trend is that the new market looks like it is coming from those that have little direct interest in the technology for its own sake – for its inherent `coolness’ (and I am trying to promise myself not to decapitate the next person who says “this technology is soooooooo cool”). Instead they have arrived at wanting a website through seeing others in action. Setting the sites up is increasingly easy, and nearly all the work is performed by the service provider, with as much of it automated as possible.

All the above companies provide social computing services rather than technology, which is an exact analogue of the way many new markets will develop in future. It is also why much of the growth in information-related services across the board is likely to come through users having the opportunity to interact with such services without serious upfront investment. If they can look and play – as per MySpace or Google Blogger – they will learn. If they can then build services to meet their needs both easily and quickly, there is strong chance they will.

It may start with the small business community, but many-a large enterprise department operates in exactly the same way, and the impact of such viral infections on the enterprise can be significant – witness Linux as just one example.

This is where Software as a Service (SaaS) comes into its own as a delivery vehicle for such a model, and let us not forget that Google is already the biggest operator in the SaaS business by a country mile, so it is not `the future’, it is  the `now’. And Google is doing all it can to make sure it happens.

To keep up with demand the company is well aware that it will need the latest, most powerful systems around, and for the future that means parallel processing. But that is only half the story, of course, for parallel hardware needs parallel software. So, in conjunction with IBM and budget of $20m-plus each, the pair is investing in providing a parallel clustered system to which a select group of US universities will have access.

The idea? Learn how to exploit the hell out of such machines, particularly when it comes to providing online services to a growing army of not just individual users but increasingly serious business users as well. That is likely to be the nature of `infrastructure’ for the majority of users in the future which means that, in practice, many of them will be able to forget about infrastructure altogether.