In the next day or so you'll probably find yourself hearing a lot about how Google started 10 years ago, and, well, isn't it remarkable that a company that started in a garage has survived that long and become a household name? I'm not going to do that. Hell, that's what Wikipedia and the official Google history are for.

I'm more interested in Google's next 10 years – because that could define what life is like in 2018 and beyond. I'm not exaggerating. And if I'm wrong, you can come back and beat me over the head with a printout of this piece.

An interesting generic forecast came from John Battelle, who wrote Search, a book about how Google catapulted to the top of the search – and more importantly search advertising pile – over AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos (remember Lycos? Adverts used a dog sniffing stuff out) and Ask Jeeves (Jeeves got whacked; now it's just Ask).

His prediction? "I'd say, by then they'd have made a couple big ass mistakes and most likely one of the key founders is gone," he forecast. "But they still [will] rule the world in terms of monetization of traffic of good intent."

It's not as though Google hasn't already made some mistakes. There's been its (purposeful) concession to China's demands to filter its content; and the (accidental) release by AOL of lots of personal data gathered by Google from AOL users. Until the latter, people hadn't realised quite how easy it was to find an individual from their searches.

To get an idea of what Google will look like in 10 years' time, it helps to imagine the world then. Important trends are visible already. Energy, food, and oil and coal byproducts will all be more expensive in real terms. That means first that power efficiency will be essential in any product we use; minimising wasted energy and effort will be part of daily life. Minimising waste, in fact, will be sensible; we'll reuse and recycle because it'll often be preferable to buying to buy new.

In computing, there are important trends that are only just starting. The rise of ultraportables (or Liliputers) – really small yet fully functional computers, with solid-state drives – is a key trend. This will bring Linux to a wider market that would never have used it before.

Mobile phones are becoming even more important; their penetration is a key indicator of economic growth in developing countries. They'll become portable internet devices for the times when we don't want to use our ultraportables.

A final point before we move into the predictions: companies develop a lot less in their second decade than their first. Though it helps to be a multibillion pound company if you do want to have a stab at continuing your dramatic growth.

OK, so what should we expect from Google in the next 10 years?

First, Android, its mobile phone platform, is very important. Google wants to be in your mobile phone where you're making searches and calls. It wants to know what you're doing there so it can persuade companies to advertise with it. After all, if you're a company and all the mobile phone traffic you see comes via an Android phone, you're going to listen with more interest to Google's ad sales people than Microsoft's.

Here's my forecast: in 10 years, Android phones will be outselling phones using Microsoft Windows Mobile or Apple iPhones. Yes, I do think that.

Secondly, Chrome - its browser - is going to be preloaded, and often the default, in computers that you buy in shops, whether full-sized ones or the ultraportables. Google has the financial muscle to make that happen, which Firefox (owned by the Mozilla Foundation) doesn't.

In fact the ultraportables are important to this story. They are the real incarnation of what Bill Gates thought the Tablet would be. His 2001 forecast that in five years the Tablet would be the dominant model on sale was wrong. But I'll pick up his wonky prediction cap. I think that it will be true of the ultraportable in five years or so; in 10 years, surely.

And I think that ultraportable, like the Android phones, will be running Linux, because there's a lot of effort gone into developing low-power versions of it already. And they'll have Google as a default search engine, and run Chrome, which will be used to write documents and do spreadsheets and check email and work collaboratively – with the data stored both in the "cloud" (on Google's or other servers) and also saved locally, on the SQLite database that underlies Google Gears. (Data in two places. It's safe.)

Meanwhile, Google's other initiative is going to be in energy. It uses colossal amounts of energy for its server farms. It's going to be walloped by rising energy costs, which is a key reason why last November it began its "RE<C" program – with the aim of making renewable energy cheaper than coal. At the time Larry Page said: "With talented technologists, great partners and significant investments, we hope to rapidly push forward. Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades." (One gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco. Or a few Google server farms.)

And, quite possibly, Google will sell some of that energy to the electric grid. How would you like to have your Google-laden ultraportable powered by green Google electric juice? Now there's a capture of the market for you.

Into this scenario I can see a couple of clouds that will loom. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have had their differences; I suspect that Battelle is right that one of them will leave within the next decade, and how Google reacts to that will be key to its future.

The other two things that will be a problem are that China will resist Google, because its authoritarian government cannot contemplate the openness of information the search engine represents. China, already the largest internet nation, will be stubbornly closed to Google's best endeavours.

The other is that there is going to be one hell of an antitrust case coming. Google's in so many places at so many times, and so dominant particularly in search, that it cannot avoid this: it'll move into some new market, and someone will raise a huge stink about how it is using its power in search to take over a new market. (A reminder: having a monopoly isn't illegal. Using that monopoly to force others out of other markets is.)

As Microsoft discovered, fighting an antitrust case takes the creative wind out of your sails; it becomes all you can do to row to shore. The Microsoft of 10 years ago was cocky, confident; today it's vast, but uncertain, overwhelmed by its bureaucracy. That could be Google's fate – even as in 10 years we use its tools all the time, and a significant number of people use phones and computers based around its products, it will be becoming sclerotic.

And then it will be time for something completely new to burst onto the scene. Very probably the people who are going to do that have only just started their first day at secondary school (high school to our American readers).

You can't guess what it will be. But if some kids ask to use your garage for a computer project, my advice would be to let them – and ask if they'll let you fund them in exchange for a few shares. Ask for 10%. If it pays off, by 2030 you'll never need to work again.