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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.
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.
Hotmail - try moving your email. You can easily forward your Gmail, and now they are opening up POP and IMAP support, which in turn is freeing you from the ads and web-based service, while still providing you the mail for free.
iGoogle - you suggest migrating an OS is easier that a portal? There are tons of portal pages, and they all support rss feeds. Now you're just trolling. Migrating an OS is no easy task. Changing your home page takes all of 30 seconds.
AdSense - There are alternatives to put ads on your page. Google doesn't even dominate the web advertising market.
Calender - Doesn't Google Calendar use the iCal standard, and can't it easily be imported into other programs?
You are either trolling, or have no clue what you're talking about.
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.
When the hell did we start trusting companies that purposefully screw us to the 10th degree and try to hide it more than we trust a company that is very open about what they do and go to extreme efforts to make the public happy? Google is, in no way, shape, or form evil. What's happened is, many of the major corporations are saying "oh shit, people are going to start expecting google-like service from us and that's really going to screw up our bottom line". In fact, I feel like there are funded, multi-corporation, organized, Google-FUD campaigns out there that put all this garbage into people's heads.
.0005 compared to the things other US companies do. Yet we somehow turn a blind eye to them and get up in arms about Google?
A company that has rendered my computer useless many times because of a false WGA positive? That's evil. A company that injects false TCP flags into sessions to "shape" bandwidth? That's evil. A company that renders a 600 dollar phone useless because I installed a 3rd party program? That's evil.
In fact, the only thing I can recall that google has done ever even remotely evil is a censored version of google search in China. That was a VERY calculated move and they were very open about the decision. Google has actually expressed regret for not standing up for what is right. But this PALES in comparison to the crap other US companies have pulled in China. This includes border-line slave labor and the turning over of information that has led to the death of many innocent people. On the evilness scale, what google did in China was like a
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Google is *NOT* a search company, they are an advertising company. In particular a targeted advertising company. Everything they do - search, maps, email, etc - is just a means to collect data on you in order to build a profile. That profile is then used to enable clients to provide you with a targeted ad when you visit the client's website.
In targeted online advertising, and perhaps online advertising in general, Google is the 800 pound Gorilla. They are not quite Microsoft yet, but they are not that far off in online advertising. They are still consolidating, they are on a curve like Microsoft's, just at a far earlier stage.
Nah, I think his original statement more accurately conveyed what he meant.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Fuck, that's like saying slavery was a temporary social imbalance, but "the market works" so we should have waited until slavery was 'naturally' socially unacceptable, or nobody needed cotton & tobacco anymore.
Lets just overlook the whole damned problem because in time it will iron itself out? Fuck you.
Abusive monopolies deserve to be cut to pieces, PERIOD. There are no monopolies in the long run, regardless of how slow government is to react OK, listen. Monopolies aren't the problem. It's when a monopoly BECOMES a problem, that WE have a problem. Give it time, and the entire sphere of influence will return to its roots in shared resources. All we need is the bandwidth. Jesus, some companies might not WANT that to ever happen, ya think? You don't suppose they might use the power they have TODAY to restrict where the market goes in the FUTURE? We'll be waiting until they either give up, or technological progress changes the market place. Just pray to God a monopoly doesn't get big enough to be able to stifle innovation too, or we'll never get there. Oh, ohhh shit, that's what happened. Just bend over while Microsoft figures out what the future of your OS will be and hope a competitor decides to go for market share instead of high margins.
Most people include a boilerplate, catch-all clause to cover their butts.
Have you actually seen people who have had accounts terminated for speaking poorly of Google?
Conversely, Microsoft disallows you to use terms like Linux anywhere in your XBox Live profile. Microsoft is acting on such a strategy, where as you are suggesting Google could in theory do so, while they haven't.
Google could abuse their position, as could many companies. How many companies depend on MySQL today? What if they abused that position? We don't talk about such possibilities, because it is highly unlikely. The company has established a track record that warrants trust.
Microsoft's early history involved blackmailing, buying out competitors, destroying standards, etc. Microsoft started in very seedy roots. Ask Steve Jobs off the record about Bill Gates some time. Google does not have such a past, nor leadership who use such tactics.
From day 1, they practiced a different model. Be open, don't harass your customers with big, annoying ads everwhere, provide superior alternatives, offer your stuff for free, etc. They have a company motto of "Don't Be Evil". Many of the things that have given Google an advantage, they offer up freely to everyone else.
They have opened the designs and standards on their server and power supplies. They contribute their optimizations back to the MySQL devs. They pay people to develop FOSS. Where is there any evidence that Google is going to start trapping people into their platform and abusing them, especially when Google is often in support of open, cross-platform standards?
Google could have released their own fork of Firefox, and locked people in. Instead they contribute code and money to Firefox. They could have released their own Linux distro, and locked people in. Instead they contribute code to BSD, OpenSolaris, Linux and all kinds of open apps via Summer of Code.
You can force parallels in places if you want. Someone made various parallels between Orson Scott Card's character Ender in Ender's Game with Hitler, and made what seemed to be a convincing arguement based on a number of coincidences that the characters were the same, save for the real biggy. Hitler believed in genocide, and Ender unwittingly committed a genocide and felt guilty for the rest of his life. Sometimes we see these coincidences and overlook the important parts.
In all the areas that really matter, Google is vastly different from Microsoft, and that is why I don't put stock in these comparisons.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.