Although it is not my style to comment on “macro” events, I jut about fell over in my tracks the other day when a friend of mine (incorrectly) said, “Did you know that more than 180,000 Android telephones are now being sold each and every day?”

I say “incorrectly” because the actual number is closer to 160,000 phones/day, which effectively translates to one new Android phone being activated somewhere in the world every two seconds.

What’s that you say? You say you’ve never even heard of an Android phone? Well, join the pack, most people think an Android is some sort of Star Wars character.

It ain’t the Android, Virginia, its the “Google Inside” that has everyone breathing just a little bit harder these days.

Consider this: when Google announced, in October of 2009, that it was giving away a free GPS (voice-based, no less) with each and every Android phone, executives at both Garmin and TomTom probably, and immediately: a.) started updating their resumes, and, b.) began lamenting the fact that their stock options had not yet vested. (BTW, and along those lines, Garmin saw its stock drop by more than 33% just after the free GPS was announced. TomTom has never recovered from the shock --- its stock price has dropped from approximately $20.00 in September 2009 to its current price of about $5.50. This, BTW, is a 72 percent reduction in share price.)

As I frequently tell my students at Duquesne, “Fat margins are nice, but they do tend to draw the attention of the big boys.”

The problem is that Google has, and seemingly overnight, become not just a 500 pound gorilla, but a Gorilla-saur, standing more than three hundred feet tall and weighing in at some five thousand tons. This monster of a company pretty much sits anywhere it damned well wants to sit.

Consider this --- less than two weeks ago, Google decided that it wanted to enter the travel market. So, it acquired its flight information from a small but profitable company known as ITA Software by simply buying ITA itself. The $700M in cash they paid for ITA was something less than a couple hours’ worth of Google’s annual profits.

Now, and armed with flight information (information used, BTW, by noted travel market leaders Expedia, Kayak, and Travelport), Google is in a position to virtually re-write the rules and procedures typically followed by travelers world-wide. Stay tuned, as this incursion has only just begun. It is not inconceivable, for example, that Google could use this particular acquisition to begin to offer consumers a software product that will not only enable them to find their hotel, but to also display the results of their hotel search directly onto Google Maps.

It makes me wonder just how many executives at firms like Expedia and Travelocity are now also sharpening up their resumes, as they see the approaching image of that same Gorilla-saur in their rear-view mirror.

Those who worship Google frequently point to their slogan, “First, do no evil” as if the mere proclamation itself guarantees that the big G will always operate honestly and with complete integrity. After all, this slogan has been around from the beginning, and so it’s awfully nice to know that Google and its Founders, Messrs. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are benign, benevolent, beneople (sorry, I just couldn’t help myself there).

And, maybe they are!

But if anyone was ever in a position to dominate the economic world, it has to be the world’s first-ever company to first collect demographic, psychographic, geographic, economic, and purchasing history/proclivity, and then spoon that data into the world’s most efficient data-blending machine!

(Man, would that job have been fun to do!)

Guess what? Google done did this.

Think about it. Do you personally use G-mail? If so, Google knows everything there is to know about you and your lifestyle. They know not only where you live, how old you are, and when and who you have married --- but they also know where you shopped for your wedding gown, how much you paid for it, and what undergarments you wore on that happiest of days (oh yeah, they also know how much you paid for them, too).

Google has eavesdropped on every single e-mail you have ever written using G-mail. And so, they also have this lovely and complete collection of data about your friends, your enemies, and just about everyone who ever passed through your life. (Oh, and they also know everything about your favorite restaurants.)

If you’ve ever corresponded with your doctor or healthcare provider, Google probably knows a hell of a lot about what diseases you have or have had, and therefore where and how you are/were (being) treated for those diseases. Even if you’ve been smart enough to keep these things off of G‑mail, they probably know about them anyway. I won’t explain how they know this, but it wasn’t really all that hard for them to find out.

The only thing that really surprises me is that (and I don’t watch this crap, but I have a friend who does and I have frequently asked him to let me know if this ever happens), none of the popular and current forensic crime shows have yet employed “Google Evidence” to solve a murder in one of their episodes. Frankly, they’re probably afraid to.

Back in the 1950’s (and again in the 60’s and 70’s), our own government was excoriated for keeping files on individual and select American citizens. Such information as: political affiliation, field of study at university, previous addresses, old girlfriends, and even favorite foods was chronicled and filed.

When it became public knowledge that the government had this information on certain of its citizens, the hue and cry was deafening.

So, the government apologized and agreed to destroy the data tout de suite (though no one actually saw them do so ---cue the dramatic music --- please, use only minor chords).

But according to sources I have read and spoken to, this scandalous collection of data on private citizens was merely a blip on the radar screen compared to what Google now has on everyone. And I mean everyone.

So what are they planning? What are they going to do with all of this knowledge?

I know one thing, if I had a private army and I was going to declare economic war on the United States and the world, I would instruct my soldiers to first secure every Google-owned server farm. That would probably get me a quick and favorable negotiated piece.

(And here I am, Ron Morris, lost trying to simply figure out what the hell the radio station down the street is planning to do with their programming next year!)

The problem, Dear Brutus, is that absolute power doth corrupt. I don’t know if Larry Page and Sergey Brin are Catholics, but I’d pay every dime that I owned for just one session in their favorite confessional.

So sleep tight --- knowing that this Mountain View-based company is watching out over all of us. After all, we’ve got the ever-growing federal government between us, protecting us from Google and the rest of the world’s diabolical software purveyors.

Now, please excuse me while I try to manage my uncontrollable laughter.