No industry is safe from Google at the moment with the search and advertising colossus dipping it's fingers into almost any market it can right now. Until now though the gaming industry has been pretty safe and largely overlooked by Google but if a company job posting is anything to go by then that stance could soon be changing.

TechCrunch has reported that over at Google's Job listing page the company is looking to employ a "Product Management Leader, Games", which strongly indicates that the company is going to be dipping it's toes into the gaming industry. They have already bought Israeli game developer LabPixies and hired Mark DeLoura who was Nintendo's Lead Engineer as Developer Advocate for Games. Such activity strongly suggests that Google are taking a serious look at the gaming industry after previous attempts to enter the market fell flat. Whether Google are aiming to develop causal online and mobile games or full blown 3D games is unclear. By my guess if this whole story turns out to be true is that Google will go down the latter route at some point; Google's an ambitious company after all but it makes sense for them to first get some content out for the Android platform and get a feel for things before offering full blown 3D games.

According to the posting, the job applicant will need to be an "experienced senior leader who will be responsible for developing Google's games commerce product strategy". Not only this but the applicant will also need to have experience in the "online content business", suggesting that whatever they are upto will be cloud based as you'd expect from Google.

So what's the deal? The deal in my view is Android and Chrome OS in particular. If one looks at the markets Google is trying to enter and think about how they might all be related you might see where Google are heading.  For cloud based services to function (Google's products rely heavily on cloud computing) as intended on Google's Chrome OS they will require a super fast broadband connection, that's a key requirement for the future of Chrome OS or any other web centric platform that relies heavily on cloud based solutions. 

Hence to achive this and ensure the infrastructure existis, Google announces plans to enter the ISP market touting 1Gbps speeds. Google also has plans to enhance the HTTP protocol with it's own SPDY protocol. Initial tests have been encouraging and have shown significant speed increases over the aging HTTP protocol. Chrome OS is merely a window or access point to next generation web content and services, some call the whole notion Web 3.0. It's weakest point is the Internet connection it will interface with. If Google can provide and ensure a stable, fast and reliable connection to Chrome OS a world of possibilities for the platform will open up in the years to come. Which leads into the world of cloud gaming, a market that has the potential for huge revenue and one that could reinvigorate the gaming industry.

Chrome OS has been shot down by gamers as it's a completely web centric platform, hence no or little locally installed content. If Google can provide a cloud based gaming service to the masses that is similar to onLive albeit a trimmed down version then they can make it so much more of an attrative option to potential users of the platform, as I doubt your run of the mill flash games will appeal to hardcore gamers. That's all Google need is the platform for publishers to distribute their content on. Not only this but Google in their traditional style would probably offer the service for free or a nominal fee at the very least because remember the service can be provided over Google's fibre network with minimal overheads/costs to Google themselves.

onLive in contrast is at the mercy of the ISPs to provide their services that onLive requires. Many ISPs throttle or limit their customers speeds when they consume too much bandwidth. No doubt, a lot of ISPs will frown at the prospect of onLive providing a constant stream of bandwidth intensive content to consumers.

If Google can figure out a way of streaming game content over the Internet as onLive claim to have then there is no reason why they couldn't offer a similar service, no reason at all. After all Google has already ported quake 2 to run in the browser with HTML 5 and javascript and achive 30FPS even at this early stage. If anyone can Google can it seems.

One thing's for sure, good or bad, Google continues to intrigue.