Peak Google? Siri edition.

Any idea why Google is spending investor's money on cool driverless cars?

Yeah, well me neither -- except that what better way of getting commuters to have still more time to be exposed to your advertising?

With Google, for all the talk of mission and vision and open and standards and aggregating the world's knowledge, they are first and mostly most, a highly successful extremely profitable...advertising company.

Everything they do comes back to advertising. Everything.

But in a world of always-on connectivity, of billions of smartphone users (soon), of hyperlocal interaction with global digital platforms and the complete integration of the physical with the virtual, advertising will change profoundly.

Google, perhaps more than anyone, is set to capitalize on this change.

But -- and this is important -- all their money comes from static PCs over wired connections. All of their money. There is simply no guarantee, no matter how well they do, no matter how quickly they move, that Google can replicate their PC margins/revenues in this new world.

This new world will be one of context, social conectivity, real-time response and recommendation engines that have a thorough grasp on our needs and wants.

There is another factor, one possibly more important than all these, however: interface.

As Kevin Fitchard of GigaOm notes, how we interact with the planetary web, is critically important, especially for those, like Google, seeking to sell us something -- or sell us to someone. This is a long race, no doubt, and Google is well -positioned. That said, Apple's Siri has taken an early lead in offering up a new user interface that is leading many to bypass existing forms of information presentation and retrieval -- which is Google's bread and butter:

Siri is just the beginning of a new wave of user interfaces (UIs) that will gradually shift our attention away from our phones’ screens, allowing us to interact with our devices in ways that don’t involve tapping keys and staring at pixels.

The most oft-cited example is “Siri, call me a cab.” Rather than perform the usual local search, displaying a list of taxi companies and word ads on a screen, Siri does all of the dirty work in the background, automatically placing a call to what its AI feels is the most relevant dispatcher. That bypass of the search portal is changing the way that cab companies present themselves on the Web, spawning a new type of SEO: ‘Siri’ engine optimization. Being in the top three listings of a local Google search or depending on AdWords to push your website to the top of sponsored results is no longer good enough, if Siri is doing the searching instead of the consumer.

But if Google and Bing are delivering direct results, rather than a list of links, what of their keyword advertising based business models? And what of the websites themselves that find their information hijacked by a multimodal UI without even an ad impression in compensation?