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Google As The Next Microsoft?
theodp writes "In this week's missive, Robert X. Cringely argues that Google is starting to look a bit like Microsoft. The search giant is learning too well from the master, says Cringely, noting that Google's launch of Goog-411 after taking a long look at investing in or acquiring Free411.com under an NDA is straight out of an old Microsoft playbook. Cringely goes on to note that Google has a problem with algorithmic optimization gone mad (seconded by Newsweek), which is wreaking havoc on some AdWords customers who may find themselves out of business before they can get Google to do the right thing. Cringely concedes that Google's inability to follow through because of IT failings may not have been learned from Microsoft — it may just be an inevitable part of having an IT monopoly."
Google has anything but a monopoly. The search business can easily go to an engine that performs better. Google has most of the market share because they are quite simply the best at performing searches.
Microsoft on the other hand plays in a completely different arena. Switching from one OS to another is nearly impossible for many users and at least difficult for most.
No, Google has a long way to go before they become anything like Microsoft, no matter what their tactics may appear like.
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
You said: Google has anything but a monopoly. The search business can easily go to an engine that performs better. Google has most of the market share because they are quite simply the best at performing searches.
You meant: Google has anything but a permanent monopoly, because monopolies don't naturally exist for a long period of time. The search business can easily go to an engine that performs better, or the whole idea of a search engine may go away when a new technological discovery replaces it with something even better. Google has the most market share because they are quite simply the best at performing searching, just like Microsoft has/had most of the market share because they are quite simply the best at offering OS users the compatibility and efficiency and reduced learning curve that they desire.
You said: Microsoft on the other hand plays in a completely different arena. Switching from one OS to another is nearly impossible for many users and at least difficult for most.
You meant: Microsoft on the other hand plays in a completely different arena, one that is quickly going the way of the do-do. Switching from one OS to another is nearly impossible for many users and at least difficult for most, only because the people who spend time pretending that Microsoft has a temporary monopoly have forgotten about IBM, Compaq, Ford, and all the previous monopoly fears that were destroyed by competition. In reality, the future of the OS has Microsoft greatly scared of what likely will be a return to a client-server environment, the same environment that Microsoft temporarily destroyed because people wanted power on the desktop, and now they want power in an interactive environment.
There are no monopolies in the long run, regardless of how slow government is to react when one company actually gains customers because they are far and away the best of the competition pile. Microsoft will be like IBM -- quiet, weak, and still holding enough of a market share to hang on. The desktop is toast, and when you have a company like Microsoft that only knows about the desktop, they'll wither along with the old platform. Give it time, and the entire sphere of influence will return to its roots in shared resources. All we need is the bandwidth.
Here are the things Google are missing to become like Microsoft:
1. Screwing customers
2. Forcing bad products on their customers
3. Participating in anticompetitive behaviour
4. Having a monopoly
5. Bribing their way through standardisation processes
6. Giving away pay-software to create vendor lock-in
7. Produce horrible DRM that only affects those who actually pay
8. Have a chair-throwing jackass as CEO
It doesn't matter how they got to their position in the search market. They can still be a monopoly in their current market position. There is no underlying requirement that one has to attain a monopoly in a bad way for it to be a monopoly. Further, it is irrelevant whether people use Google by choice or not. You're automatically coupling 'monopoly' with 'bad thing that only a bad company could do.'
Whether Google is a monopoly or not is up for discussion. But you're being blind to what it means and how a company gets to that position.
The moment Google tries to destroy free standards, destroy competition, and break the law regularly at will, let me know.
Until then, can we please stop with all this hyperbole and nonsense about how Google is evil?
Last I checked, MSN and Yahoo both volunteered private data to both US and Chinese governments, and Google was the only company to stand up to both, yet the media kept insisting that Google was the evil party for eventually caving into Chinese law. Google gives money to the Summer of Code project, volunteers tons of code, and also doesn't have a monopoly in their market.
Google hasn't thrown chairs, hasn't threatened to destroy anyone, and doesn't have leaked evidence like the Halloween documents, proving their evil.
Where exactly are the comparisons valid?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
How many generic "Is Google Evil?" articles are we going to get on Slashdot? I've yet to see one that produces anything newsworthy. They all just make general suggestions that Google is the new evil empire. Not only are these articles devoid of any meat and flawed, they are dupes. Please don't repeat them.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Google is not a seach company, it's an advertising company. It's really weird that this fact doesn't stick in people minds.
That's like saying CBS is an advertising company, not a television company, or the the NYT is an advertising company, not a newspaper company. Yes, they make most (or in Google's case, nearly all) of their money off ads, but the reason people buy ads with them is because of the number of people who pay attention to their core product, which in Google's case is still search. There are a million crappy ad sites out there on the web, but none of them make the kind of money Google does, for the very simple reason that nobody has any reason other than the ads to go to those sites.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The premise of this post seems to be that each company has to be an "X" company, where X is a single noun. If Google is an advertising company, it can therefore logically not be a search company.
Adherence to this view forces you to claim that the company dominating internet search worldwide is in fact not a search company!
If your premises forces you to believe in crazy things, it's time to check your premises. In my world Google is both a search and an advertising company, and several other things as well. It's a little more complex to think this way, but with some practice most people can manage quite well with such a complex world view!
1) Google continually tries to improve its algorithms to deliver an improved experience, rather than sitting on its laurels.
2) Sometimes the change in algorithms has negative consequences for some websites.
3) Some websites are living so close to the edge that one month of Google putting their ads in less optimal places costs them so much money it drives them out of business in a single month.
4) It's not the fault of the marginal businesses who don't have the sense to set daily and monthly expenditure limits they could afford, or who have made themselves so dependent on Google that one month of suboptimal ad placement sinks them. It's Google's fault for trying to improve its algorithms.
5) Therefore, Google is Microsoftian in its evil.
except that they don't have a monopoly on anything, haven't been convicted of illegal business practices, and haven't been pressuring customers into exclusive contracts. And they have been sponsoring and supporting true open source projects.
But, yes, they are like Microsoft in that their stock is doing really well.
We don't declare a bowling ball a tool of evil just because it has great potential for personal injury.
Although, I might declare you a tool for making such an assumption.
Money is the root of all evil?