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Google's Schmidt Says He 'Screwed Up' On Social Networking
"Google chairman Eric Schmidt took responsibility for the search titan's failure to counter Facebook's explosive growth, saying he saw the threat coming but failed to counter it."
Note: The original link's landing page was changed after we posted it. The one showing now goes to a Wired article.
The same story (coverage of a May 31 conference presentation by Schmidt) also quotes him as saying, unsurprisingly, that cloud services will be 'the death of IT as we know it.'"
No company worth their salt will put all the company data "on the cloud" No way in HELL is my customer DB and accounting DB going on the cloud.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The posted url now 410's. here's a link to the article on PC mag and the wired source too...
jaymz
Before it was thin clients. Then thick clients. Then outsourcing. Then mobile devices. Then tablets. Now cloud services.
Who exactly is going to manage all your cloud based servers? Do these guys really expect some $8/hr amazon support monkey to manage your linux patches, fix bugs, write scripts, install applications, customize applications, etc.
If the cloud does anything, it just moves your server room to a different room off-site. You still need IT to make it do anything useful.
More specifically: why does he believe that everything on the entire Internet needs to be governed by Google? Not even Ballmer or teh Jobs are that megalomaniacal.
and I feel fine.
from the perspective of the world's largest add-space reseller.
But you know, enterprise IT is really not their business, so I'd take their view with a pinch of salt.
If you or I screw up, we'll get shown the door without so much as a penny.
I seem to remember going through this in the 70's when the innovation of the personal computer finally broke the wall. Now you have Apple, Google and Microsoft dreaming of setting it back up again. Good luck guys.
He gets to be "more entitled" to his opinion of the merit of Facebook's business practices than you or I. Or apparently, like anyone with greater broadcasting power, his opinion on any other subject, regardless of field.
He should change his name and start over.
Just like every retarded social networking fad before it, and every one which will come after it which lulls people into giving up their privacy for a pittance, there is nothing that a respectable company should WANT to "counter" "with their own".
It is sad to see that Schmidt has fallen so far to lose sight of his own company's egalitarian mantra: "Do no evil". He now only sees the evil, and he covets it, like Gollum covets the One Ring.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
I think what he means is that it's the death of IT in America.
I mean, with virtualization, "cloud" services can allow your admins to be in a cheaper country, like India. Since you never get to touch your hardware, your admins don't need to touch the hardware anymore either.
It's yet another way for management to increase profitability by lowering costs by firing everyone except themselves, who all get big fat bonuses.
What the "cloud" really provides is yet another way to make the rich richer, and everyone else poorer.
Never mind that they are handing the crown jewels over to a bunch of people, who, should the shit hit the fan, are more than happy to steal all that data and keep it for themselves, leaving their rich corporate masters with nothing.
It's akin to giving the serfs all the weapons to protect the castle, and then the king thinking he's somehow safe even though no guards are loyal to him.
Greed has truly fucked up this country. We're going to find, in less than a decade, that we've given away everything that made this nation great, and we'll be left with very little to show for it. Rome was smarter than we were.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Shouldn't change IT. Putting important company data on the web with access via a simple l/p violates any decent IT security policy, and most bad ones. But say it does happen, all it means is that everyone will need to become a network engineer, since even if they don't need local server administrators, they'll still need network folks to maintain the network that has to be on the ground locally.
Dodgeball was Twitter before Twitter.. Google bought it and fucking squandered it, stupidity of a Microsoftian degree.
I can't wait to see Facebook melt down though, too scamilicious to IPO in the US lol...
And Apple and Microsoft were two of the companies that broke that wall, possibly the most famous ones. What irony.
It's the end of IT as we know it (and I feel fine). Enjoy.
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway This is the road to hell
Yeah, that just outsourcing. It didn't work when they tried selling it to us as the solution for everything about 10 years ago and I don't see why its suddenly going to work now.
then they are gonna do it. I can't be the only one who has noticed that consumer/client data security is not exactly a priority concern. Enjoy.
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway This is the road to hell
Google went about social networking all wrong. With Buzz, the idea is to build a network of contacts, and post updates to them. As Facebook has shown us, social networking is really all about recommending "friends" you've never met, showing how many thousand people think they might know you from somewhere, and bombarding users with trivial accomplishments in thoughtless games.
Social networking isn't about being social. It's about filling bars.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
....quotes him as saying, unsurprisingly, that cloud services will be 'the death of IT as we know it.'"
Perfect. Then we can move on and implement the next tech/science revolution...
I am happy to see someone like Google stating this clearly, but isn't that a bit hypocritical ? They started this all and promote gmail and Google Documents
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
At least somebody here has some concept of reality.
Social networking is World of Warcraft, for girls.
No company worth their salt will put all the company data "on the cloud" No way in HELL is my customer DB and accounting DB going on the cloud.
While I sympathize with you, that doesn't make sense. Google's data is on Google's cloud. Facebook's data is on Facebook's cloud. Now, the question is, are you big enough to build your own cloud, or can you leverage the advantage of another, larger company's cloud? As long as you remember that cloud is not perfect, and you do proper backups, you are completely fine. A server on premises can fail as, or more, easily than a server in a cloud. If you never back up either, then it's the same mistake, not some new "how dare you trust the cloud?!?" mistake.
It's the difference between treating cloud as "a" server, and not "the" server.
I8-D
.
Or do I just settle for "Fucker's about my age, said something which made sense, forgot to turn his filters on just like me, it's not the end of the world as we know it"? Oh, and "Give me a billion dollars for being the newest sensible pundit". Fuck, Taco was a billionaire for about 30 minutes and felt the need to write about it here.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html :-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness): :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-( "
"Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet":
http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html
Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It's yet another way for management to increase profitability by lowering costs by firing everyone except themselves, who all get big fat bonuses.
So, what is your solution for increasing productivity? Giving everyone meaningless jobs like TSA Agents groping and feeling their way to a pay check offering no real service or product?
It is easy to parrot the left wing rant, but it is much harder to actually give a solution to the problem. However, if what you're talking about is selling the goose that lays the golden egg for a quick buck, screwing anyone but the short term share holders, then yeah. But the fix to that is to tax short term transactions, and promote long term holding of assets.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
True. However, Cloud services do have their benefits when you integrate them with disaster recovery. I guess just about any large corporation is already "cloud-based," more or less. The SharePoint farm is a cloud, virtual folders are a cloud, etc. I don't see why the sky is suddenly going to fall.
AMEN dude.
My ECAD software, Altium Designer (the best PCB design software available, IMHO), data libraries have been "moved to the cloud" and the software development has been moved from Australia to China. A large number of the Australian staff has been made "redundant". I'll be avoiding upgrading to the newer releases. We will probably eventually have to switch to Mentor or Cadence.
Idiocy and greed is not isolated to the U.S.A.
Never mind that they are handing the crown jewels over to a bunch of people, who, should the shit hit the fan, are more than happy to steal all that data and keep it for themselves, leaving their rich corporate masters with nothing.
Encrypt everything and don't let your provider ever touch your private key. Doing it any other way is just asking for data theft.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Rome was smarter than we were.
Perhaps at the beginning, certainly not at the end. Sooner or later someone will "cross the Rubicon"...
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
when hackers wake up in the morning with a wet spot on their pants they know they have dreamed about the cloud again... give it time... give it a little more time...
I think we all know how to increase long-term productivity. It's increasing the short-term that is the problem; too much of it is going on to the detriment of the long term.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You're confusing a practical issue for a political one. Once you've outsourced all the actual work to another country, trained their locals how to do whatever it is you do and only keeping the management on shore; why would they need you anymore? Those workers will quit, start their own companies with the skills you taught them and compete against you.
This is what happens to many companies that outsource to China. The reason that knockoffs are so pervasive is that the very factories that make their own stuff are also cranking out the knockoffs.
How do you kill that which has no life?
It's yet another way for management to increase profitability by lowering costs by firing everyone except themselves, who all get big fat bonuses.
And hiring a bunch of Indians. But who cares about those, amirite?
Dilbert RSS feed
He says Google worries about dictators and governments using Google technology for the wrong reasons, then says he'll be heavily involved in Obama's re-election campaign. wtf?! Obama has not only continued many of the horrendous abuses initiated by Bush, but has gone extraordinarily further in creating an imperial Presidency. He has claimed the right to assassinate U.S. citizens without charges or trial, and he has continued to erode our Constitutional rights through signing of the Patriot Act, and also his 'secret interpretations' of it (which are not subject to the scrutiny of even the courts, much less 'we the people').
I dont know what kind of end-user Schmidt is used to working with. In my experience moving things "to the cloud" just means your IT guy(s) no longer have physical access. You still have to set up network shares and permissions, manage email accounts, change passwords, install applications (even if it's just a link on a desktop), implement and manage the internal networks, etc.
Unless this magical cloud manages to create more competent end users IT isn't going anywhere.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
"Social" isn't Google's problem. Mobile is.
Google revenue for 2010 was $29 billion. Facebook revenue was $1.86 billion. If Google was as successful in "social" as Facebook, it would barely affect their bottom line. "Social" just isn't that big a business.
There are bigger businesses where Google missed out - in telephony, music sales, and movie sales. The ones where Apple is making money. Apple revenue for 2010 was $63.5 billion. That's where Schmidt failed.
Google is trying to figure out how to monetize Android, but so far, not with great success. Apple has been very successful in using the iPhone to create a direct connection between the user's wallet and Apple's bank accounts. Google tries to do that, but not as profitably.
Meanwhile, while ordering their people to focus on "social", Google is having problems in their core business - search. Back in Q3 2010, they merged Google Places results into web search, not realizing how easily Places could be spammed. That backfired and got them some bad press. Then there was the Demand Media content farm problem and the J.C. Penny link farm embarrassment. The press then caught onto the fact that Google isn't very good at stopping web spam, "black-hat" SEO started to go mainstream, and Blekko, with their strong anti-spam policies, started to gain traction. Now the FDA and the Justice Department are investigating Google for knowingly running ads for sleazy offshore pharmacy operations. Google may have to pay $500 million in fines.
That's a classic big-company mistake - failing to run the cash cow properly, while management is distracted with the shiny new stuff.
how about privacy intrusions, wireless scandal, breaking of dont do evil policy in multiple fronts ...
Read radical news here
luddite.
CEO's get the big bucks because they avoid those problems. He just admitted he wasn't worth his what his compensation.
I was an early Gmail adopter, and it quickly became my defacto-standard email address; thus it became the real-world link to my online identity. But it is absolutely astonishing to me how completely and utterly Google has dropped the ball with regards to social media. Not had dropped the ball... has dropped the ball, present-tense. Because it's still dropped. And yet they keep coming up with over-engineered solutions to what is a ludicrously simple problem (Buzz? Seriously?)
All Google had to do was give me a fucking homepage and a fucking textarea to jot down quick status updates, and voilà!--Facebook is dead in a month. No asinine games, no privacy-stealing bullshit, no invites to time-wasters, no childish crap. Just a public frontpage tied to my Gmail address. This is so simple... and they can still do it! Yet they continue to keep looking for the Rube Goldberg solutions.
But the craziest thing is this: every Gmail account already has a public account page! They've already done most of the work! So how do you get to it? Let's fire up Google and take a look.
Hmm... could it be this prominent iGoogle link at the top-right next to my username? NOPE. All that does it take me to a half-baked late-90s "dashboard" where I can add "gadgets" to spice up the Google homepage. Except I already have a smart phone and a desktop computer and
they ALL want to be my primary "dashboard"... I don't need the beautifully simple Google homepage to be sullied with more fucking weather apps.
So where could this link be if it's not in the "logged in" area of the top navigation? Well, it's not one of the primary menu bar links (Web | Images | Videos | Maps | News | Shopping | Gmail | more...) Maybe under "MORE"? Let's see... Translate, Books, Docs, Finance, Scholar, Calendar, YouTube... holy crap they've got everything under the sun, but no public account page. How about under the EVEN MORE link? You know, the link that opens up a separate page with dozens of Google-related projects? NOPE.
The nearly invisible way to get to your public account page? /account to the URL
1. Log in to your Google account
2. Add
And there you go.
WHAT THE HELL, GOOGLE?
And notice how the top-right menu has changed? Now instead of the lame iGoogle link, we've got a My Account link.
WHAT THE HELL, GOOGLE?
So they've already got an account page. Just put a TEXTAREA on top and show the last 5 posts and you're DONE. DONE. That's the END OF FACEBOOK. That's all you have to do, guys! Christ almighty it's so infuriating I have to stop typing so I can mop up all the frothing spittle.
CEOs are responsible? Not any I've seen. They're ambitious, greedy, irresponsible and self-serving; as are the evil empires they control. Why do people allow these tyrants to rule us so unethically? People must be fools, in my opinion. Truth is executives take as much as they can, and they provide crap in return. Not one top CEO demonstrates any sense of real responsibility that I've ever seen. If CEOs, and other executives, were held to the same high standards as, say the cleaning staff, we'd all work for great places that create wealth for all, not only the elite.
Not only that, is it anyone's "job" to see progress as a threat and work to counter it? That's typical narrow minded, destructive imperialism at work.
SuperCalc and CP/M - The combo that built KayPro!
That said, I worked as a student, part time in the first computer store I could remember - '78, '79. The month that VisiCalc "broke", there were suits showing up: "I need a VisiCalc".
OK. Do you have a ][ or ][+ ?
"Oh, do I need those? Get me one of them, too."
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Most Americans are selfish enough to care more about their own job than about someone in another country having that job.
I wish I had mod points, because you definitely deserve them. Google has almost everything they needs in little parts and they are to dumb to realize they just need one nice interface that interconnects it all in a sane way.
I think part of the problem is Google wants to be social in a way that seemlessly interacts with things you are already doing, but don't realize that being social is an endpoint of things to do in and of itself.
What the "cloud" really provides is yet another way to make the rich richer, and everyone else poorer.
Oh, give me a break! If a company/corporation finds that it can cut costs by outsourcing some or even most of IT to the cloud and are happy with the results, by what inane logic should they keep on-site IT staff?
Deal with it.
Prior to the popularity of social networking with computers, those identical activities were considered anti-social. I still believe Facebook/Twitter et al. is fundamentally anti-social.
The Admin and the Engineer
I mean, with virtualization, "cloud" services can allow your admins to be in a cheaper country, like India.
Not if latency has anything to do with your business (which it does for most businesses). And by "latency" I mean both speed of response of admins, as well as speed of response of servers. If your web-based customers are primarily in America, you don't want database queries (which can easily be more than 20 per page depending on the application) traversing the ocean... and if something is broken, you don't want a troubleshooting response time of 15 hours between email replies.
All Google had to do was give me a fucking homepage and a fucking textarea to jot down quick status updates, and voilà!--Facebook is dead in a month. No asinine games, no privacy-stealing bullshit, no invites to time-wasters, no childish crap. Just a public frontpage tied to my Gmail address.
Because asinine status updates from random contacts reporting how drunk they are, what they had for breakfast or what their cat had for breakfast are so much better.
No thanks, please keep gmail a clean, uncluttered email client; that's what many of us like about it. And leave social networking for those who want to be in social networks.
MS tried to pull something like that with hotmail and didn't work so well. Not that they were doing great against gmail, but if anything, the social network thingy embedded in hotmail only drove more people to gmail.
What you suggest sounds like a less-capable Twitter. I think you're greatly over-simplifying social networking. Almost nobody uses it simply to have a website; those inanities you hate are what actually get and keep users. In fact, I see no "social" in your social networking at all.
We're going to find, in less than a decade, that we've given away everything that made this nation great, and we'll be left with very little to show for it. Rome was smarter than we were.
Agree, except we didn't give it away. We pawned it.
You do realise the irony of typing this on a personal computer, or some derivative, right?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I agree completely with your comments, however the "social" part in social network implies that somehow you'll make some info visible to other people, for example making your contacts AKA "friends" visible to other contacts. I doubt people who use Gmail want that. There might be a way to convince them, like making a wall and then allowing people to comment on that, but then again, would Google have the right privacy settings? For example I have about 100 friends on Facebook that I can share stuff, I don't want to share stuff with 1000+ contacts that I have in Gmail.
So it's more complex than that, Google would have to
1. convince people to share stuff
2. have sane privacy settings that differentiate between family, friends and the rest of Gmail contacts.
The second part is not that hard, but now it's probably hard to convince people to put stuff out, Facebook did that mostly by fooling people with their quick sand privacy settings...
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
All vendors must be considered to be unreliable. Do you know even one that would not unilaterally change the terms of service?
Do you know even one that would not change radically if some top manager is replaced?
Do you know even one that would not give lame excuses if there are serious outages?
Do you know even one that would reliably inform you if the manner in which they serviced your account changed?
I hardly ever see nor meet my senior managment, and if they make an appearance it is usually by web cast, and what they say is mostly gibberish. Could't we outsource some of that, saving billions along the way?
>Greed has truly fucked up this countr
This country like all countries was built on greed. Nothing got worse lately, if anything, things are more regulated than ever.
I don't buy the whole 'idealizing the past' argument but it does get you mod points on slashdot.
What real usefulness has come out of social networking for the people? Seriously? Facebook has only ONE thing it is good for: it is a glorified version of classmates.com.
Anyone who is really part of your real circle of friends, they are on your phone contact list and call you directly.
Until I read your post I hadn't realized just how much crap Google owns these days. They could do to shut down about 75% of that stuff really. Docs, Gmail, YouTube and that search engine should be enough.
All Google had to do was give me a fucking homepage and a fucking textarea to jot down quick status updates
Blogger?
"...less-capable Twitter."
Now that's impossible.
I don't disagree with any of your points save for the "End of Facebook" bit.
I use Facebook for a lot more than what you describe. Perhaps it would be the end of twitter - assuming there was an easy way for others to subscribe to your posts?
yeahyoureright. If there aren't enough jobs for everyone, I'd rather have one for myself than starve and happily give my job to someone on the other side of the planet. In otherwords, I have the same attitude that anyone anywhere else on the earth would have if the gun were pointed at their own head.
MOD PARENT UP
lol
I think I've seen this page before, a number of years ago. And it's pretty much what a user like me wants - a sitemap of google services attached to my account, because as you've more-linked and even-more-links above in your description, there's a fuck tonne of services!
If they fail to monetize Android, but still pigeon hole the iPhone into a niche market, well that's a defensive win for Google. And they're doing that much very effectively if for no other reason than because people simply don't want all identical phones.
Apple's great strengths in design simply fall away once they get beyond niche status. Jobs is a genius who's given the word much. As one example, consider the time machine metaphor that makes ordinary people actually use incremental backup. Yet, he's too eccentric to conquer any market.
In addition, Apple has nothing that isn't immediately replaceable by something identical albeit less pretty. Even Apple's seeming lead in music sales pales when you consider a simple google search for "[artist] [song] mp3". Conversely, Bing, etc. simply cannot supplant Google.
Btw, there are also ways to poison the social well spring and obliterate facebook by offering traffic-analysis-resistant anonymity, end-to-end encryption, and friend-to-friend file sharing, but that'd ultimately damage their own profits from gmail too. Ergo, that task falls to smaller & more disrupting companies.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
That smarts. :p
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
The Rubicon was crossed at the beginning of Rome's "greatness" -- Julius Caesar (and his army) crossed the Rubicon when he (essentially) took power. Rome fell to the Germans some 500 years later.
Rome was smarter than we were.
Yes, quite. Rome's five point strategy for global victory:
1. Mercilessly invade, massacre and subjugate the barbarians with your Legions-O-Doom (tm). Huzzah! I-tal-y! I-tal-y!
2. After a few years, outsource running your Legions-O-Doom (tm) to the surviving barbarians, because they're better at it. A win-win for all!
3. After a few more years, get too cheap to continue paying your newly outsourced barbarian Legions-O-Doom (tm). Austerity chic!
4. Hey, who's these guys at our gates? Guards! Guards! Where are my Legions... oh.
5. Crap.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Rome was smarter than we were.
Perhaps at the beginning, certainly not at the end. Sooner or later someone will "cross the Rubicon"...
Arguably Julius Caesar was the beginning of Rome's glory, not it's end. Sure he had some domestic political... critics... but you can't conquer the world without getting stabbed in the face by your mates a few dozen times, right?
Rome wasn't exactly a fun shiny light of peace-loving democratic freedom even in its republic era,and after the Empire it still took a few hundred years to fall. About a thousand and a half if you count the Eastern Empire, and the Turks do. Two thousand and change if you count the Dark Ages of Europe as just a particularly long intra-Empire secession struggle. We still use Latin-1 encoding for a reason, after all.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I supposed that's what happens with government contractors are fighting for the bid to be premier surveillence platform for the USA. . . Both want to be the Stasi, but only one will be victorious! Oops, did I say that? *boot to door* ARGHHH!