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What's Next For Google?
j_heisenberg writes "Technology Review has a nice story about the coming MS-Google showdown. I like especially the data comparison for different media on page 2 concerning data content."
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It would be nice to have a simple MS-Paint like interface to sketch a little symbol (like the contamination sign, or some more obscure wiccan symbol) and have google return both definitions, and better images.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
The only people who don't use google are those who haven't seen its full power. Take, for example, my father. He used any search engine, but usually MSN. Then one day he came to me, saying "What is this song called?" referring to a song he knew a few words to. I said calmly, "Go to google, and type the lyrics in quotation marks, and you will find the answer." It worked exactly the way I had said, and now he only uses google. And looks down at MSN.
I'm still waiting for the Google instant messaging client that will link right Gmail. It strikes me as the one truely obvious thing that Google hasn't done yet.
The ad market for adsesne will eventually dry up, either through click fraud or through a recession that kills ad spending. As Yahoo figured out in 2000, ad spending is the first thing to go when times get tight...which invariably leads to calls for revenue diversification. Google will end up going the Yahoo route of charging fees for some services once they hit this patch. When you have to report revenue every quarter, telling investors to hold on until ad spending comes back just doesn't cut it.
Summary--Google's best moneymaking potential is in the black helicopter arena, where their assets will blow away startups like BayTSP, Cyveillance, and Genuone despite the startups having had the first mover advantage.
Yes, this doesn't square with "Don't be evil." Neither does helping the PRC subjagate its people by assisting with censorship. And a publically traded company, as any Cryptonomicon MBA here can tell you, cannot have the luxury of a conscience.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
For those who are interested, there is a flash animation of the possible evolution of google. Its quite possible, also makes you think. http://oak.psych.gatech.edu/~epic/
I argued that if it was to survive, Netscape needed to imitate Microsoft's strategy: the creation and control of proprietary industry standards. Serenely, Barksdale explained that Netscape actually invited Microsoft to imitate its products, because they would never catch up. The Internet, he said, rewarded openness and nonproprietary standards.
I suspect the characterization of Netscape is a little starry-eyed, but I can't be the only one who thought, "No, that Netscape executive was right!" His point (someone else can argue about how accurate it is), though, is that rewards for "openness and nonproprietary standards" did not go to Netscape: MS trashed them, and in the business world Netscape lost horribly. We (as in the users of the Internet) may have won, but we won at Netscape's expense.
And then:
In contrast, the losers in these contests have usually made one or more common mistakes. They fail to deliver architectures that cover the entire market, to provide products that work on multiple platforms from multiple companies, to release well-engineered products, or to create barriers against cloning. For example, IBM failed to retain proprietary control over its PC architecture and then, in belatedly attempting to recover it, fatally broke with established industry standards. Apple and Sun restricted their operating systems to their own hardware, alienating other hardware vendors. Netscape declined to create proprietary APIs because it thought Microsoft would never catch up.
IBM's opening of the PC architecture is thought of by geeks as A Good Thing: by letting go, they created the market we have today, even though they didn't benefit from it. TFA says IBM lost market dominance as a result. It's interesting that he doesn't address the question of whether the PC architecture would have taken such hold of the market if it had not been opened up to competitors in the first place...but again, what we see as a win for PC users, he presents as a loss for the people who came up with the PC.
It's also interesting that he doesn't explain the contradiction between failing to "create barriers against cloning", and Apple and Sun's "alienating other vendors" by making their OS only work on their own hardware. He needs to pick a side on this one...
Anyhow, no grand point -- just some things that stuck out for me in TFA.
Carousel is a lie!
I wish they would implement some type of spam filtering for search results.. Ever try searching for a drug? You get like 20 of the same exact webpages when you click on them it brings you to a huge spam site with the words of like 100 drugs all over the page. I find it very annoying nowadays when I goto search for alot of terms and the first 2 pages are completely spam pages with no content on them at all but a bunch of words to move up in googles pagerank