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Google's Insular Nature
stockpicker_dude_78 writes "Robert Cringley has written a thought-provoking article on Google's insular nature, and compares them to the similar environment at Microsoft." From the article: "Google is secretive. This started as a deliberate marketing mystique, but endures today more as a really annoying company habit. Google folks don't understand why the rest of us have a problem with this, but then Google folks aren't like you and me. The result of this secrecy and Google's 'almighty algorithm' mentality is that the company makes changes -- and mistakes -- without informing its customers or even doing all that much to correct the problems."
Motley Fool staffers are just now realizing that Google is slowly running out of gas. Perhaps all this clickfraud exposure is leaving people wondering how could they get away with this Internet ponzi scam for so long... Luckily Google got a little smarter and quieted the naysayers a bit by doing the MS thing and buying all the competition around them. Smart move. MS bought all threats and consumed them into the heap of junk calls Windows. Google is doing the same slowly via different angles (Skype, Writely ... which competes with MS' Word, Andriod, etc). Anyhow, since its all opinionated, I wonder when will Google's true adclick fraud will truly come to fruition... Experts estimate the true value of what Google would owe would be a couple of BILLION in clickfraud.
Infiltrated dot Net
From the article:
Google attracts advertisers like Luis with the idea that their ads will be cheaper because, frankly, they are selling something that is only thinly traded. The dream is that the system scales and scales fairly, only it isn't fair at all because if Amazon wants to advertise an equation editor USING EXACTLY THE SAME AD TEXT AND FORMATTING AS LUIS -- their words will cost 100 times less than the same words bought by Luis. It's not that Amazon (or any other big Google advertiser) has better copy writers, it is just that they sell a broader range of things.
"A large percentage of impressions & clicks do have £0.01 minimum bids," said Jeff from Google, "but these are our very highest quality ads/advertisers."
In other words, the minimum word price is 1p, BUT NOT FOR YOU.
Um, yeah. The same words should be more effective coming from Amazon than from Cringely's friend Luis, because people are simply more likely to click.
You could run all this through an algorithm that maximizes expected revenue (AI people would call this "utility") for Google based on click probability, and you'd come up with pretty much what Google does.
I'm sorry. I'm not a Google fanboi, but this is ridiculous.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
I know it sucks for the small guy, but the way AdSense works is logical and good for the consumer. Previously it was not enough clicks = irrelevant ad = no more ad impressions. Now it's not enough clicks = irrelevant ad = higher price. Both solutions make, er, (ad)sense.
I have never had a problem with Microsoft or Google. Are they perfect? Of cousre not. And yes, I have worked with a LOT of operating systems over the many years I have dealt with computers. I think that success always attracts the detractors.
Pardon any mispellings. I have been hitting the Newcastle Brown Ale a bit much.
This article is not an in-depth analysis of Google's business practices so much as it is one man complaining about two or three bad expereinces he has had with Google.
This doesn't mean that Google is secretive or paranoid, just that Google is a large corporation. Corporatoins are not perfect, just like their legal equivalent.
Why is this news?
I was thinking of converting to paganism, but where the hell can you find sacrificial virgins these days?
Not totally, if you were in early (IPO) you made money, but not now.
Look, I use Google all the time... but I fail to see how they make one dime from me.
By contrast, take eBay. I use them too -- at least I can see how they have directly made a few hundred bucks from me over the last few years, for services rendered.
ebay is 2/3 the price of goog (P/E ratios), so, right off the bat, goog stock ought to drop $100 USD just to be priced similar to eBay... then, maybe both of the aforementioned stocks could drop in value by half again, just to be priced more in line with other stocks... (P/E 20-ish).
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The summary does a poor job of presenting the article. The article is more about the poor job Google is doing with communicating with their customers, especially when things go wrong. Customers in this sense are paying advertisers, not search engine users, picasa users, google earth users, etcetera.
That said, secrecy is useful for an organization. When you are telling the world what you are doing, so you are telling your competition. So it's not all bad.
The thing that's always bugged me about Google is the generalized sense of smug superiority the company seems to emanate. "Look at our amusing job position titles!" "No, don't ask us about what we do with all the data we collect!" "Here, look at the quirky benefits we provide for our employees!" "Please, stop pointing out that while we brag about how much we love open source software, most of our exciting free applications are only available for Windows!"
Google is the kid in high school who is smart (but not exceptionally so), works *very* hard to maintain 4.0 GPA and also sucks up to his teachers all the time. However, he gets very secretive and passive-aggressive when you point out his imperfections.
Of course they are secretive.
;)
They know as well as the rest of us that it will take about 3 days for everyone on the planet to dump Google as soon as a search engine without pages of fake sites filled with ads or just irrelivant sites is all you get no matter what you search for.
Remember AltaVista?
No reason for Google to give us 3 days notice
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
It all comes down to the AdWords algorithm and its intent, which isn't to help Luis OR Amazon, but to simply maximize profit for Google.
Darn those publicly traded companies! How dare they!
"Do No Evil" only really applies when you don't count making a profit as "Evil", folks.
its quite interesting that people think a corporation is exempt, or somehow free of greed. Sam Wall was a good guy, but when he died, the corp. made things evil. Google can be, or maybe already is, evil. Internet users, as a whole, should be asking 'what have you done for me lately' not what is evil or not evil. The whole business of the Internet is about what have you done for me lately. Any Internet business model not based on that is a business that really doesn't understand the Internet.
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There's a reason Cringley has remained a mediocre journalist, while google is a multi-billion software firm founded on being really, really smart.
This reason is exemplified by Cringley misunderstanding that google (and microsoft, and coke, and countless other hugely successful firms) are successful *solely* because they own trade secrets, leveraged into strategy -- and not because of some stupid "mystique" concept invented by mediocre journalists because they don't know what the company is actually doing, but still get paid by the word.
Duh.
People said Microsoft couldn't make a decent browser in 1996
/. would agree that ten years later, they still can't. Popular by default (not by choice) does not necessarily equal decent.
I think most people on
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Because it looks to me here more like what's happening here is just the "geek community" (by which, of course, I just mean "people who read slashdot") increasingly losing all touch with reality.
You can see this happening in a number of ways, but the increasing process of demonizing Google more and more (to the exclusion of having much energy left over to care about corporate interests which are legitimately harming the public good) is just the funniest.
You wanna know when Google got "evil"? It had nothing to do with China. Google got "evil" when they got successful. Self-proclaimed "geeks" got so used to rooting for the underdog that, pavlov style, as soon as Google became the overdog they started reflexively rooting against them.
I was reading Slashdot on the day that Google went IPO; people were already predicting, before the IPO, that Google would no longer be able to keep up a perception of being "good" while a for-profit, publicly traded company. And then the next day, when Google went IPO, they went ahead and started perceiving Google as "evil", without going to the bother of waiting for Google to actually do anything evil. Once Google finally went and got around to starting up a search site hosted in China*, these people started using this retroactively as the justification for their loose anger against Google. People who weren't looking for a reason to demonize Google barely even noticed the whole China thing.
* What, you think what Google did was "censoring search results"? The Chinese google search sites hosted in America and Taiwan aren't censored and still work just the same as they always did. It's just that now Google also has a local site hosted in China and adhering to China's censorship laws that people in China can use if they want unfettered access to Google without having to circumvent China's web filters every time they need to search for something. Is this an ethical thing for Google to do? Maybe, maybe not, with the balance probably being on "not". But by doing this, Google has hurt nobody; if Google hadn't done this, nobody would have been helped and all that would have happened is MSN would have become the default search engine in China. The only reason we view Google's presence in China as a problem is that we for whatever reason hold Google to the special standard that they shouldn't do business in China, a standard we do not hold Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft, Fox News, CNN, McDonalds, or the U.S. Government to.
How can you tell when the Slashdot userbase has lost all sense, logic, or integrity? When they start agreeing with Cringely.
Just stop viewing the world with a high school mentality, and the problem will magically disappear. Once you're moved on and, like the rest of us, view things like companies based on their real-world actions and products-- rather than whether they make you feel inferior in front of an imaginary teacher that no longer exists-- you'll feel so much better. I promise.
Google folks don't understand why the rest of us have a problem with this
Who? Wha..? Who are these "the rest of us" that this guy speaks of? A similar phenomenon happens with Apple fandom sites. Basically, when a news site or reporter decides to focus only on one or two companies, s/he ends up not having enough news, and this causes a lot of frustration. And they usually end up going down the path of speculative reporting (which is usually really boring, long, and incorrect).
Google is probably too secretive, but I appreciate their attitude. They have VERY LITTLE respect for the stock analysts, and Wall Street in general.
The fact of the matter is that the stock market is built on false (or at least dubious) perceptions. Google refuses to play that game. They don't tell ANYBODY what they're doing, which evens the playing field. The "big players" don't have any insider information, and so don't have a significant advantage over the "little players". I think it's great. Google basically says "We're not going to help the rich get richer."
That said, they are playing a dangerous game. Wall Street (and their ilk) essentially controls the U.S. economy. A given business pisses them off at their own peril. But at least Google is making the effort. And so far it has worked.
that it is secretive, it seems to me that company is pretty saintly.
Now I myself can say worse things about Google, namely that I read through their defense of their collusion with China on censorship, and the more they defend it the clearer it is that their motivation is greed. I myself never got as aggressive as I would have in pursuing Chinese business opportunities because of being ill at ease about their government, and Google could have survived losing that market.
However, on the whole they are a good and generous company, possessed of the same amount of greed and other flaws as most generally good corporations or people have.
This could, of course, change.;-)
Really, most of us have a lot more flaws than being secretive.... I do (but I keep them secret;-) ).
Google's stock pirce could bottom out tomorow and I doubt that it would have much affect on their day-to-day buisness.
It would affect their day-to-day business when half their employees walk out because their options are now worthless.
So stop reading those threads - go read something else, it's your choice.
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They're not. They're a bunch of guys with a great PR machine, who like to make money, and who are surrounded by a bunch of technonerds. Behind the hype, Google is the Walmart of the internet.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
You have a point. But look at how Microsoft, Ebay, AOL, etcetera are running around lately like headless chickens all looking for the next pot o' gold (fad) at the end of the rainbow to defeat Google. They are all truly scared what Google is going to do next and are reacting with little thought, wasting resources and energy shadow boxing google.
/. to find out.
How many worthless initiatives does MS alone announce these days to defeat Google? Run read
And google can spend it's time conserving resources and energy, developing, innovating, and not paying attention/reacting to every little move the competition makes.
I don't think Google being completely transparent would be a strategic advantage right now. Let MS and the other wear themselves out first chasing rainbows.