The In-Progress Plot To Kill Google

twitter writes "Four years after Steve Ballmer vowed to kill Google, Wired details Microsoft's, AT&T's, and big publishers' ongoing slog. The story is filled with astroturfers, lobbyists and others spending millions to manufacture FUD about privacy and monopoly in order to protect the obsolete business models of their patrons, who are mostly known for progress-halting monopoly and invasion of privacy. Their greatest coup to date was preventing Google from rescuing Yahoo."

Comments

Re:conspiracy theories

[the_arrow]

You forgot to mention that Yahoo is still very big in south-east Asia. In some countries their mail and messenger services are number one.

Re:conspiracy theories

[Dun Malg]

I'm curious how Google's mail folders don't make sense. It was implied in your statement that Yahoo's folders make sense.

Going out on a limb here, as it's been several years since I abandoned my Yahoo email for my own mail server--- in my mother's basement, under my bed, next to my star wars underpants--- but I think it might be a "tags" vs "folders" issue. I've had one of my brother's friends tell me he didn't like Gmail because when you create a new "folder" for mail and a filter to sort it by, mail gets "copied" to two different folders! That's how it's supposed to work, but some folks just can't get over the fact that they have a Gmail tag for Ewok discussions and one for eBay auctions and that the email saying they've won an Ewok TV tray on eBay shows up IN BOTH PLACES!!!!1! Tags are a more flexible sorting system, but they require a certain mental shift to grok, and some people just have that "eighty column mind" thing going.

Re:WHY the hell it cant be heroism ? or goodwill ?

[quarterbuck]

In Google's case Stockholders don't really matter. When they IPO'd they made two kinds of stocks, Class A and Class B. Class A is what got sold, Class B is what the insiders (Larry and Sergey) hold. The most important thing is that Class B has infinitely more voting power than Class A stock. It means that Shareholders cannot vote out the board for "not being evil enough". Even better, Class B stocks cannot be sold to outsiders (if they are, the convert to Class A)
Google made this pretty clear when they IPO'd -- their letter to investors said that they were not trying to be just another corporation. They specified that the stocks the customers were getting was a claim on the profits, not a claim on voting rights.
Essentially, as long as the insiders stay honest, the company will stay honest. The quarterly numbers, stock prices are all meaningless to the board in this case.