Google's Six-Front War

wasimkadak writes "While the tech world is buzzing about the launch and implications of Google's new social network, Google+, it's worth noting that Google isn't just in a war with Facebook, it's at war with multiple companies across multiple industries. In fact, Google is fighting a multi-front war with a host of tech giants for control over some of the most valuable pieces of real estate in technology."

Comments

Patents

[Microlith]

The tech industry is basically building up the greatest case ever to be made for why patents, software patents especially, have transitioned away from their original intention and become far more a hindrance and obstruction rather than a means of getting useful knowledge out from closed circles.

Re:Patents

[countertrolling]

...their original intention...

That's the part that everybody has gotten wrong so far.. Patents and copyrights are designed from the beginning to restrict the transfer and sharing of knowledge. If people are going to continue to claim property rights, they should pay a property tax. They should not be permitted to deny a license to use the property, and the government should be allowed to determine a reasonable price. Divulged knowledge is public property, exclusive privileges over it should come with a cost.

Re:Patents

[Microlith]

Patents were made to ensure that in exchange for making information public, the inventor would get temporary exclusivity. The purpose was to get information that would have been held as a trade secret, or in past ages by trade guilds, and potentially lost. Now, of course, patents are useless as they rarely describe HOW to make the item in question, and are instead a vague concept grab and used not to protect the inventor but as clubs to beat others down with.

Copyright is similar, though it was meant to give creators some incentive to create.

If people are going to continue to claim property rights, they should pay a property tax.

They don't claim property rights. They confuse the issue with the poor phrase "intellectual property" even though it isn't.

Divulged knowledge is public property, exclusive privileges over it should come with a cost.

They do come with a cost. Eventually they will lose the exclusive privilege to the information. The problems lie around the laws that make up copyright and patents.

Re:Patents

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

As their name suggests, patents are designed to encourage otherwise secret matters to be made publicly available in exchange for a limited monopoly on their use. It would take a face much straighter than mine to claim, at least with respect to matters anywhere near software, that they are other than a mess today; but that was in fact the theory.

Re:Patents

[LandDolphin]

The cost was the R&D that went into it.

You are correct in saying that "Patents and copyrights are designed from the beginning to restrict the transfer and sharing of knowledge", in so far as to let the holder recoup R&D costs and turn a profit before the information becomes public.

Who would spend R&D resources just to have others duplicate the finished product with no investment? Patents ensure that creators will have time to recoup costs.

Now, there is a good argument that the length of Patents (and copyrights) have become too long and they need to be shortened so they do not decrease advancement.

Re:Patents

[martin-boundary]

Who would spend R&D resources just to have others duplicate the finished product with no investment? Patents ensure that creators will have time to recoup costs.

OMG! How on earth did the human race survive for millenia before patents? You're so right, without patents nobody would ever invent anything and we'd all still be living in damp caves arguing about who was going to be the dumbass to pay the development costs of inventing fire...

Re:Patents

[countertrolling]

It's not about society. It's about protecting specific interests, to protect industry from the effects of new technology that threatens its existence. From Gutenberg's printing press right up through the present and into the future. There is very little difference between these rules and the "Red Flag" laws that attempted to interfere with the use of the horseless carriage. Imagine having to to disassemble and hide your computer or TV set every time you wanted to read a newspaper.

Re:Patents

[countertrolling]

...but that was in fact the spin

:-) Sorry, had to do it.

Actually I could see the the point of these laws to minimize plagiarism, but beyond that they are an anathema to progress.

Re:Patents

[Anonymous Coward]

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Hmm, nothing about restricting the transfer and sharing of knowledge. Maybe you should have put more thought into it.

Re:Patents

[zill]

Copyright is similar, though it was meant to give creators some incentive to create.

If people are going to continue to claim property rights, they should pay a property tax.

They don't claim property rights. They confuse the issue with the poor phrase "intellectual property" even though it isn't.

Patents is a type of intellectual property by definition. Maybe this isn't true in your local jurisdiction, but it's certainly the case in the US, where Google is located.

Re:Patents

[dakameleon]

Patents were specifically designed from the beginning to not restrict the transfer and sharing of knowledge; there's a reason why patents granted are public and accessible to you. The person(s) applying for the patent share the details in order to claim exclusive right to exploiting their invention or innovation for a specific period of time, with the laws protecting them from someone copying their process. After the period of protection runs out, anyone can use the details posted to create & sell products.

For example, if Company A had an innovative product for which they did not apply for a patent, and Company B came along and copied their product (through reverse engineering, or stealing plans, or hiring away the inventor), Company A would have no recourse to stop them selling the same product. If Company A had a patent, they could stop Company B until such time as the patent expires - they have that time to come up with a new, more compelling product.

(and copyrights are about protecting authorship attribution and right to income from selling copies. Again, nothing about keeping the knowledge locked up.)

If there's anything wrong with the concept these days, it's that the terms are longer than is strictly necessary to encourage competition & innovation, and patents are granted too freely on spurious innovations. For copyright, terms are extending almost in inverse proportion to the ease of copying, a perverse incentive that allows the producers of the original material to rest on their laurels in a way that was never intended by the progenitors of the copyright and patent provisions (i.e. the Founding Fathers)

Re:Patents

[jc42]

... patents are designed to encourage otherwise secret matters to be made publicly available in exchange for a limited monopoly on their use. It would take a face much straighter than mine to claim, at least with respect to matters anywhere near software, that they are other than a mess today; but that was in fact the theory.

Actually, if you consult various histories of the concept of patent, you'll find that restricting patents to new inventions is a rather recent (17th C?) development. Historically, it has long been common to (as the the US Patent Office now does) give a patent to anyone willing to pay the appropriate registration fee.

As usual, wikipedia has an article that describes this, and mentions that it was James I who added the requirement to English law that a patent had to be for something new. He did this in response to some extreme abuse of the patent system to award common commodities (salt is mentioned) as a monopoly to a specific manufacturer, which effectively prevented previous manufacturers from continuing their business.

But this isn't the first documented case of such things. There are a number of descriptions of an ancient Greek cooking contest, in which the winner was awarded a patent for one year, during which nobody else could produce the same dish. There's no hint that the winning entry had to be new; it just had to be the one preferred by the panel of judges, exactly like modern cooking contests.

It's likely that the current US scheme of rewarding a patent for things well known in the industry isn't a corruption, but rather a return to the original use of patent law. It was designed to give a monopoly in exchange for paying whatever fee the local ruler(s) demanded.

(This may seem cynical to modern readers, but it doesn't take much reading of the relevant ancient histories for it to pass from cynicism to understanding that this is one way that rulers have always enriched themselves.)

Re:Patents

[ATMAvatar]

That's the part that everybody has gotten wrong so far.. Patents and copyrights are designed from the beginning to restrict the transfer and sharing of knowledge.

False.

Patents and copyrights were designed to encourage the transfer and sharing of knowledge. In return, the inventor/writer is granted a limited monopoly to distribute the work in the case of copyright or license the use of the work in the case of patents. The underlying goal in the case of patents is to increase innovation both by providing greater access to the ideas of others (on which new inventions can build) and by providing an incentive to create via the monopoly grant.

Re:Patents

[tolomea]

The problem is with the term "intellectual property", it's not property. It's government granted and enforced monopolies on the exploitation of ideas. Calling it intellectual property is an instance of framing aka the art of choosing the words to bias the discussion, much like calling tax cuts "tax relief".

Re:Patents

[jc42]

It's not about society. It's about protecting specific interests, to protect industry from the effects of new technology that threatens its existence. From Gutenberg's printing press right up through the present and into the future.

Ah, but you're ignoring the well-documented fact that copyright was invented well before Gutenberg. The very name dates from before printing technology, when all texts had to be copied by hand, by scribes. And the first documented copyright had nothing to do with authorship; the concept was invented to control the copying of bibles and other religious texts, whose authors were centuries dead (and often unknown). The function of copyright was to legally restrict the production of religious texts to only the versions officially approved by the local rulers, and to keep the number of copies sufficiently low that only the priesthood could get copies.

The application of copyright to original documents, for economic reasons, was an innovation of the late 15th century, some decades after Gutenberg's work, and a century or so after the first print shops appeared in Europe.

But most of the history of copyright is about limiting the production of hand-copied text to only "authorized" versions, primarily for religious reasons. The extension to commercial transactions is, historically speaking, rather recent.

As is so often true now, there's a useful wikipedia article that summarizes this, and includes some useful links (for people who want to actually understand the history rather than just repeat the current commercial propaganda on the topic ;-).

Re:Patents

[10101001 10101001]

Patents is a type of intellectual property by definition.

I think the point was to argue that "intellectual property" having a definition that includes patent is absurd. This is based on the obviousness that property is, under a classical sense, some sort of inherently rival thing be it personal property, title and usage of land, etc. Meanwhile, there's nothing inherently rival about information.

Hence the point that the use of "property" seems intent to confuse the issue by extrapolating how natural patents, copyright, etc are when they're not natural at all. To have to admit they're entirely societal/government constructs would then result in having to, at some level, justify the existence of patents, copyright, etc. That's something I don't think a lot of people really want to do, given how many edge cases could likely be cut out in various industries where it'd be better if there were less or even no patent, copyright, etc protection. Of course, I can imagine where there's places it'd be better if there were even more protection, but then "why not just extend protection for everything"? Well, that's almost certainly less than optimal. Is it any wonder some people are so upset about copyright being extended so much?

PS - It's rather funny the GP brought up property taxes, as they were created precisely because even though property is such a core belief in many developed countries, it was recognized by some that property ownership can reduce to something akin to a fiefdom when a few people can retain large land ownership and force most people to be their tenants. Beyond that, property taxes tend to push people to actually usually their owned lands, through mining or farming or whatever, instead of leaving the land fallow. Whether or not the idea works or not, the GP's point at least has merit on the principle of property taxes being applied such that people don't needlessly hold onto copyrights, patents, etc and try to do more than let them go fallow and hence underutilized. It seems only fair if one really wants to talk of such things as if they're property.

Re:Patents

[ChatHuant]

OMG! How on earth did the human race survive for millenia before patents? You're so right, without patents nobody would ever invent anything

This is really disingenuous. The issue of what we call now intelectual property is not new, and has existed long before patents and copyrights were introduced. Because there was no good mechanism for establishing and enforcing ownership of new inventions and discoveries, many creators refused to make them public, to the disadvantage of everybody else. Many skills and processes were passed only within a family, or a guild, or from master to apprentice, and their secret was jealously guarded. Look at the Venetian Republic, which ensured the monopoly of Murano glass for centuries, by forbidding glassmakers to leave the city; look at many scientists, like Galileo: in order to claim priority for his discoveries, he used to send encrypted descriptions to other scientists (see here for details), and only make the discoveries public later. It's possible he had even discovered Neptune, back in 1613 (see here for details) but he did not disclose it, fearing somebody else may claim it. As a result, the existence of Neptune remained unknown until 1846, that is more than two hundred years later.

Or check the thoughts of actual writers living in a period of weak or inexistent copyrights; look at Dickens here or Twain here.

Re:Patents

[vijayiyer]

It is property because the law allows you to buy, sell, and transfer it.

Re:Patents

[vijayiyer]

Maybe because in the millennia before patents the costs of development were low and the reward was high? There was little cost to inventing fire, but the benefit of survival on a cold night sure would have been nice.
You can argue that possibly high cost development is a waste and that we're not better off as a society with that sort of R&D, but it seems a stretch to think that it would continue without the promise of financial compensation.

Re:Patents

[Anonymous Coward]

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Hmm, nothing about restricting the transfer and sharing of knowledge. Maybe you should have put more thought into it.

So you want to talk to me about putting thought into it ... okay then.

How precisely do you intend to "secure for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" without restricting the transfer and share of knowledge? A video game is essentially a particular sequence of 0's and 1's. It is knowledge. But you may not freely share it nor may you transfer it to anyone you like. That would be copyright infringement. The knowledge of how to design and produce a particular invention is also information, but while the patent is valid you can't implement that information yourself without getting a license. This is a restriction.

In summary, pull your head out of your ass and you'll realize this isn't a contest, you don't need to "win" at all costs, that me being right about this doesn't make you a loser who must save face, that the big win is not having your common sense distorted by such a petty concern. Fuck the ego-trippin' bullshit. QED.

Re:Patents

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Patents and copyrights are designed from the beginning to restrict the transfer and sharing of knowledge.

Yeah, that's why they're very specific, detailed, and published for all to see.

Re:Patents

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

OMG! How on earth did the human race survive for millenia before patents?

Without global communication, running water, food that was safe to eat, and an epically large pile of medicine.

Re:Patents

[Schadrach]

Patent's goal is exactly the opposite of that though, because to get a patent you are supposed to be required to divulge exactly how your $PATENTABLE_THING functions. The alternative is Inventors keeping their methods and designs secret until someone else figures is out, rather than being given legal protection for a limited period of time in exchange for divulging their methods and designs.

The amount of time that protection lasts might be too long (especially for copyright, somewhat less so for patents), and (in particular for patents) might have expanded to cover things that it logically never should have (business method and software patents -- software is essentially by definition a formal way of describing mathematical formula that can be interpreted by a machine; math is not patentable; q.e.d. software should not be patentable, let alone be protected by both patent and copyright [is this the case for any other kind of works?]).

Re:Patents

[VortexCortex]

The problem is with the term "intellectual property", it's not property. It's government granted and enforced monopolies on the exploitation of ideas. Calling it intellectual property is an instance of framing aka the art of choosing the words to bias the discussion, much like calling tax cuts "tax relief".

It is property because the law allows you to buy, sell, and transfer it.

Right; Just like, sex. In the US state of Nevada, and some other countries, the law allows you to buy and sell sex.

The term is "prostitution". Now, I don't know about you, but my sexual property rights are taxed heavily. Even if I choose not to exercise my ability to sell access to my amazing Johnson, I still have to list all the kinds of sex it can perform as taxable property when I file my taxes. Each time I get paid for sex I loose a little bit of my sexual property -- just like when you sell an idea!

Some clients have bought enough of my sex that they literally own most a majority say in the handling of it. ( You do have to be careful though -- Once, After I sold my sex, the client re-sold it on e-bay, and it was purchased by a 16 year old! I served 5 years for statutory rape! )

I once sold an idea that was so novel, it was in a totally invented on the spot language from a culture that existed only in my mind. A scarce resource like that -- the copyright traders, ie publishers, just had to have it, but they didn't count on the fact that no one but me knew what the strange symbols meant! Due to economics of scarcity, I'm now the richest man on InstainFrigth (that's Earth, but shhhh, don't tell anyone, it devalues my made up language).

Now, Don't tell me when you list your property you don't claim all of your ideas, passing thoughts, and your va-jay-jay!?

Why, those are 10 times more valuable than even a Big Johnson! You should talk to your accountant and maybe a sex or idea lawyer -- You could be liable for serious mental and sexual tax evasion; Even if you don't give a fuck!

I guess next you'll try to tell me that you are born with a head full of all the ideas you'll ever have, and a body full of all the fucks that you will ever give...

Re:Patents

[0123456]

Without global communication, running water, food that was safe to eat, and an epically large pile of medicine.

Because none of those things would have happened without patents.

Re:Patents

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Because none of those things would have happened without patents.

In the same time frame?

Re:Patents

[zill]

I perfectly agree that patents are governmental constructs. Without governments, the rule of law, and a functioning court system, patents would not exist.

But I could argue that the concept of ownership is also just a social construct. In a lawless environment, I "own" everything that I can obtain with force. Without a functioning legal system the concept of ownership cannot be enforced.
 

Re:Patents

[drsmithy]

Do you have any references or speculations as to why that was the design goal of copyright and patents?

Because the only way to make something valuable is to make it scarce, and the only way to make something with an infinite supply scarce is to create a legal structure that restricts access to it.

Re:Patents

[martin-boundary]

This is really disingenuous. The issue of what we call now intelectual property is not new, and has existed long before patents and copyrights were introduced. Because there was no good mechanism for establishing and enforcing ownership of new inventions and discoveries, many creators refused to make them public, to the disadvantage of everybody else. Many skills and processes were passed only within a family, or a guild, or from master to apprentice, and their secret was jealously guarded.

That's debatable. Guilds were government granted monopolies. They were able to keep their secrets for generations because the local king granted them the privilege of exclusive rights to their trade.

That's the reason why inventions and discoveries were closely guarded: because the guild members *could* - it was their right as guild members, and non-guild members were hunted down with the authorities' blessing.

Real progress did not come from the introduction of the patent system, and never will. Real progress has come from the liberalization of trade, and the breakup of the rigid feudal society. That's what has allowed more people than ever to devote time to inventions and discoveries, without worrying that some existing stakeholder will prevent them from doing so.

People are naturally inventive. They will improve systems and invent better ways of doing the things that matter to them, if we let them. Among the people, there are a small number with science backgrounds, and if we let them, they will invent and discover a lot more than now.

Re:Patents

[tycoex]

I won't lie, that was pretty funny.

Re:Patents

[hedwards]

The same way they did prior to copyrights. There would be a wealthy land owner who would basically sponsor the work. That owner would by virtue of controlling the creation be in control of it.

If anything the version of patents up until relatively recently that was in place democratized the area as it allowed somebody to get some sort of payment without having to have a long list of inventions. There have been generous folks over the millenia that have given their inventions away, but there'd be fewer inventions and we'd be much further behind where we are today.

Re:Patents

[drsmithy]

But I could argue that the concept of ownership is also just a social construct. In a lawless environment, I "own" everything that I can obtain with force. Without a functioning legal system the concept of ownership cannot be enforced.

The fundamental principle behind property is "might makes right". You own what you can prevent others taking from you.

The only difference between a lawful and lawless environment is that in the former you outsource the "might" part to designated groups of people (police, judges, etc).

However, this fundamental principle doesn't apply to "intellectual property" because it can't be taken, it can only be duplicated. No matter how much might you wield, you can't make someone forget something.

Re:Patents

[hedwards]

One of the very serious problems right now is punishing companies for trying to avoid infringing on anybody's patents. Get caught infringing you'll pay damages, be stupid enough to have conducted a patent search prior to being sued and you'll be looking at treble damages typically.

Re:Patents

[martin-boundary]

You can argue that possibly high cost development is a waste and that we're not better off as a society with that sort of R&D, but it seems a stretch to think that it would continue without the promise of financial compensation.

Then why is it that the vast majority of inventors, scientists and artists who create the new inventions, discoveries and works of art, are employed for average salaries?

If your idea was right, then nobody would go to work for Sony, GM, IBM, Monsanto or any corporation that produces patentable tech: those corps can make millions in licensing new technology, yet their employees get 100K odd a year. That's a huge disconnect, that can only be explained by the opposite of your idea: people do in fact invent and create without the promise of monopolistic rights to their inventions.

Those rights mainly matter to sustain an entirely different class of people: not the inventors, scientists and artists, but the managers and investors whose sole concern is maximizing returns. If patents were abolished, they would suffer, but inventors would continue to invent at an increased pace.

Re:Patents

[martin-boundary]

The time frame is a function of the number of people working on the problem. The number of people working on a given problem is a function of the world population. Progress is faster today because there are a lot more people on Earth with relevant skills, and it will keep getting faster as the population of people with skills grows.

Re:Patents

[gaelfx]

Perhaps we need a different method for limiting software patents, such as limiting the patent to a certain number of devices sold that use that particular software patent in a meaningful way, say 2 million units, and once that many units are sold, the patent would expire. Maybe 2 million is a low-ball number, but it seems a fair enough way to deal with both the protection aspect AND the fast pace of change in software.

Re:Patents

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Right, so how does motivation factor into this equation?

Re:Patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, except that your "useful wikipedia article" makes absolutely no mention of copyrights existing "before Gutenberg", instead taking the (very conventional) approach of dating copyright from "efforts by the church and governments to regulate and control the output of printers".

Before printing, copying was a laborious process that required scarce resources, highly trained labor and - above all - a great deal of time. To say that the church "controlled" what was copied is a bit like saying that the US government "controls" the FBI - they were paying the piper, so of course they called the tune, and to paint this as some kind of sinister ecclesiastical conspiracy is both silly and unnecessary.

Re:Patents

[martin-boundary]

Same as it always has. Survival, improvement, curiosity.

What I'm saying is that there's no evidence that patents cause an increase in the natural rate of invention. We have seen an explosion in the number of inventions over the last two centuries, but we have also seen an explosion in the number of skilled people over that period.

Re:Patents

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Same as it always has. Survival, improvement, curiosity.

Okay, now in this case money is an added motivator.

We have seen an explosion in the number of inventions over the last two centuries, but we have also seen an explosion in the number of skilled people over that period.

That's easy enough to prove. Let's see a graph that shows the rate of inventions running parallel to the birth rate.

Re:Patents

[dwightk]

the government should be allowed to determine a reasonable price.

barf

Re:Patents

[martin-boundary]

All right, here's a little experiment I just did, I'll give you the steps so you can repeat it.

Quick google search for patent applications

Quick google search for world population

Now cut and paste the data for years 1963-2010. I've used the 5th column (total utility patent applications) as this seems like it might be relevant. Clean up the data a bit:

cat patents.txt | awk '{print $5}' | sed s/,// | grep -v '*' | tac > pat.txt

cat population.txt | egrep '(^19|^20|^21)' | sed s/,//g > pop.txt

Now if you load this in octave, you can make a quick graph:

plot(pop(:,1), pat ./ pop(:,2))

As you can see from the graph, the proportion of patent applications from around the world is roughly constant until about 1990, then it suddenly jumps up.

Obviously, this only represents US patents for a rather short time period compared to human existence, it would be interesting to find data to extend back two centuries if possible.

Does anyone know what happened in 1990 in the US to change the patent application rate?

Re:Patents

[martin-boundary]

It's an argument against the idea that R&D requires the promise of great financial compensation. The vast majority of inventors aren't being enticed by patents, they're just working a dayjob.

Inventors give up an large unstable cash flow and large capital debt for a good reliable cash flow and someone else putting up the capital.

That kind of economics applies to every person, not just inventors. So it has no relevance to the question of whether patents foster inventions.

Re:Patents

[phonewebcam]

You said "not".
Let's see how robustly you defend patents once you've had a call from the m$ lawyers.

Re:Patents

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...we lost a shitload of tech? look up "Greek Fire" or Damascus Steel to see two techs that were lost because they were kept as secrets.

The problem isn't so much the original idea of the system, it is that douchebags like the late Jack Valenti figured out how to bribe and game the system so they could have "forever minus a single day" which is the current copyrights system, or "patent the most vaguest idea I pull out of my ass crack and sue the shit out of anything even close to my ass crack idea" which is the current patent system.

Make patents and copyrights 7-10 years with the ability to pay for yearly extensions, starting at $1 and quickly jumping to over $1 million after a decade past the original term and $100 million after 2 decades. that way if some supermega corp thinks they have something REALLY that valuable, let them pay for it. Everyone else will have made their money and moved on, thus freeing huge amount of our culture from being lost.

For an example of being lost look at the non big name DOS games of the 80s through early 90s. Many of these companies are gone, many of these programs have NO chance of running on a modern machine, and good luck finding who owns the rights. I had a great little idea a few years back, to get together with a programming friend of mine and offer "DOSBox...in a box" which would have been a preconfigured DOSBox with the old DOS games preloaded and a nice GUI, all on a flash stick. That way those that didn't know how to set up DOSBox would have an easy way to try the funky and the rare just plug and play. So what happened?

Copyrights happened. Most of the games we tried to find info for have passed through so damned many hands nobody knows who owns shit, and the few that we did find wanted frankly more per unit than the things sold for new because "they might want to monetize the IP some day" so all those games will eventually be lost and the public will be poorer for it. Kinda like how there are tons of movies disappearing every year because the major studios can't figure out how to monetize the IP from some grade C movie from the 30s or 40s with no AAA stars anybody has heard of.

So if they want to keep it? Make them pay. Hoist them by their own petard because if I quit paying property taxes my property gets taken by the state, the same should happen to intellectual property. If you don't pay to keep it up? Into the Public Domain it goes. Just imagine how much richer our lives would be if all the music of the 50s through 70s, all the games of the DOS era, and all those classic movies, were free to be mashed up and remade and to be enjoyed.

I know that in my case we were planning on making donations of 10% of any money we made on our DOSBox in a box idea to DOSBox with the hopes of helping as well as sharing any changes and configs we came up with. After all it wasn't for the geeks on the DOSBox forums, it was for the kids and folks that wanted to try these classic games and have them as easy as we had those old shareware CDs back in the day. Sadly after 3 months of trying to deal with the legal minefield we just decided it wasn't worth doing all that hard work when in the end no matter what we did we would have gotten a C&D or sued by a company that hadn't sold the thing in 20 years or had ended up with the "IP" in some merger of a merger of a buyout so nobody knew they had it until they hit us with the suit.

Re:Patents

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

That's really interesting, man.

Does anyone know what happened in 1990 in the US to change the patent application rate?

Isn't that about the time LCD displays and 16-bit processors were starting to become ubiquitous?

Re:Patents

[StripedCow]

I read so many stories about what is wrong with the patent system. And yet, nobody seems to come up with good ideas about reforming the patent system. Yes, people mention that the duration of patents should be at most X years and obvious software patents should not be allowed. But how to get these ideas generally accepted and implemented as laws is where the problem lies.

We have heard all the arguments against the patent system. So please, let's shift the focus of the discussion.

Re:Patents

[NoOneInParticular]

Does anyone know what happened in 1990 in the US to change the patent application rate?

That's a rhetorical question, right? Beginning 1990's the US courts, in a couple of landmark cases, decided that software patents were legal. What you're seeing is the ensuing land-grab.

Re:Patents

[GuldKalle]

Yes yes, the restriction on sharing is their method for getting people to share their knowledge. It is certainly not their goal, quite the opposite.

Re:Patents

[symes]

Who would spend R&D resources just to have others duplicate the finished
    product with no investment? Patents ensure that creators will have time to
    recoup costs.

OMG! How on earth did the human race survive for millenia before patents?
You're so right, without patents nobody would ever invent anything and we'd all still be living in damp caves arguing about who was going to be the dumbass to pay the development costs of inventing fire...

They would take out their sword and chop their bloody heads off! Things were so much simpler in those days.

Re:Patents

[speculatrix]

You are confabulating the current situation where making perfect copies is so cheap as to be effectively free with the historic situation where copies were expensive due to being labour intensive and where perfection came at a higher price. This discussion is about the latter and how copyright law came to be. Sure, it's out of date, and needs changing, but the vested interest is in maintaining the status quo.

Re:Patents

[shentino]

Maybe they accept 100K or so for giving their stuff away to the corporation because the legal department would squash them like a bug if they dared invent for themselves.

Re:Patents

[shentino]

When things like planned obsolescence and costly proprietary replacement parts (razor blades, ink cartridges) make it more profitable to be shoddy, it's hard move away from a disposable society.

Re:Patents

[jbengt]

It's likely that the current US scheme of rewarding a patent for things well known in the industry isn't a corruption, but rather a return to the original use of patent law. It was designed to give a monopoly in exchange for paying whatever fee the local ruler(s) demanded.

Yes, but it is a corruption of the US Constitution, which empowers Congress:

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

Re:Patents

[Bengie]

Except no one invented a sword yet because that required fire, so the person who made a sword should have paid the person who invented fire.

Re:Patents

[jc42]

Yes, but it is a corruption of the US Constitution, ...

Indeed. And that passage in the Constitution was worded as it was, in part because the guys who wrote it were familiar with the way that patent systems in Europe had often been corrupted to create monopolies on common goods. The phrase "To promote the progress of science and useful arts" was designed to prevent patents on things that didn't involve such progress.

I wonder what the Founding Fathers would have thought of this infamous recent patent. ;-)

Re:Patents

[InsectOverlord]

It's likely that the current US scheme of rewarding a patent for things well known in the industry isn't a corruption, but rather a return to the original use of patent law. It was designed to give a monopoly in exchange for paying whatever fee the local ruler(s) demanded.

Still a corruption, or at least the USPTO not doing its job properly, because the US is a signatory of the Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (aka TRIPS) agreement, which specifies patents are meant for new inventions, regardless of what the term historically meant.

Re:Patents

[InsectOverlord]

I don't think those corporations would hand out those six-figure salaries for R&D if patents didn't enable them to make money out of it.

Those rights mainly matter to sustain an entirely different class of people: not the inventors, scientists and artists, but the managers and investors whose sole concern is maximizing returns.

Exactly.

If patents were abolished, they would suffer, but inventors would continue to invent at an increased pace.

Not so sure. What is certain is that we would go back to the days when trade secret was the only device available for innovators to ensure they profited from their innovations, being otherwise unable to compete with bigger companies with greater manufacturing capacities and streamlined production processes. And that isn't good for progress.

Re:Patents

[The13thSin]

This must hands down be the weirdest reply I've ever read on Slashdot... and I've read quite a few strange ones...

Re:Patents

[ScrewMaster]

Patents and copyrights are designed from the beginning to restrict the transfer and sharing of knowledge.

No they were most certainly not. They were designed to (temporarily!) restrict the monetary rewards received from creative activities to those who owned the rights to utilize or disseminate that information, that's all. At no point was the information itself meant to be confidential: if you didn't want to disclose your invention then you simply didn't patent it, or did your best to keep it a trade secret. Especially in the case of patents, the requirement for disclosure was intended for the exact opposite purpose you're suggesting, in that anyone could examine the details of a patented invention, and possibly invent an improvement that would, in itself, be patentable, or at least non-infringing. That way more ideas are turned into implementations, more creation and invention occurs, and society as a whole benefits.

The Founders meant for information to be free, even if the application of it was not. Furthermore, the social contract implicit in this arrangement has since been broken (shattered, really) by Congress and the IP lobby.

Re:Patents

[ScrewMaster]

You said "not". Let's see how robustly you defend patents once you've had a call from the m$ lawyers.

Irrelevant to a discussion about the intent and purpose of patents. That an entirely different issue (excessive litigiousness) that really does need to be addressed, I agree, but has nothing to do with what the Founders intended the patent system to achieve.

Re:Patents

[ScrewMaster]

This must hands down be the weirdest reply I've ever read on Slashdot... and I've read quite a few strange ones...

No shit, but I almost had my drink running out of my nose.

Re:Patents

[countertrolling]

That way more ideas are turned into implementations...

No, the present system actually discourages that. More ideas are simply locked up for as long as possible. It's no different than land speculators prevent all development on the property because the property was bought simply to flip over for a higher price. If knowledge cannot be shared and used, you have less creation and invention, because the vast majority of it depends on previous works.. When it's locked up the way it is now, you get stagnation and society loses a great deal with poverty and starvation, which is only beneficial to business that depends on low wages

I never said it was about confidentiality. It's about speculation.. A person can claim knowledge as property and then sit on it to prevent others from using it at all. This is primarily what's wrong with the system. And I'm saying that if you want exclusive control, you must either use it or license it out at a reasonable price, or lose it.

Re:Patents

[ScrewMaster]

No, the present system actually discourages that. More ideas are simply locked up for as long as possible.

True, but as I point out, the present system is not what the Founders wanted, or is it the system under which we rose to economic pre-eminence. It was changed, and very recently.

Great

[Haedrian]

Google has a tendancy to create awesome stuff and has the money to back it up.

Hopefully it'll wake up a few competitors who might just want to try something better.

Or they could end up squabbling over patents. Whatever works.

Re:Great

[ISoldat53]

Viva la guerre!

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has a tendancy to buy awesome stuff that other people have created and has the money to back it up.

FTFY. And before someone tries to say protest. Look at this link.

Re:Great

[symbolset]

Yeah, in addition to building great stuff in-house, they also buy stuff. After seeing what they've done with a lot of the stuff on that list, I'm impressed. Can't wait to see what they do with SageTV - which they just picked up a couple weeks ago. Android tablet with OTA DVR? That would be interesting.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

> Android tablet with OTA DVR? That would be interesting.

Can't you do without television for just a few hours of your life?

Re:Great

[mcvos]

Google has a tendancy to create awesome stuff and has the money to back it up.

Hopefully it'll wake up a few competitors who might just want to try something better.

Or they could end up squabbling over patents. Whatever works.

You can joke about it, but you make an extremely good point. Many big companies are trying to compete on patents instead of on the actual quality of their product.

If your product is good, you will win, whether you have patents or not (look at Google). If your product sucks, no amount of patents will save you. Yet the patent system suggests that the succesful, innovative companies need to pay a tax to the has-beens in order to keep them alive. It rewards companies for neglecting the customer and focusing on lawyers. It's a millstone that will drag our economy and our society to the bottom.

Re:Great

[symbolset]

Dude, I'm married. Im not going to find out if there's anything interesting on TV, well, EVER. An Android tablet with OTA DVR might help me find out what my kids are on about. Otherwise I'm totally disassociated.

Incontheivable.

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as they don't get involved in a land war in Asia.

Re:Incontheivable.

[zill]

Apparently General Montgomery never heard of Genghis Khan and Nurhaci.

Re:Buzzing

[AmigaHeretic]

Yeah, I'm not too excited about anything "Google" that's personalized anymore. I mean I still like Google and they have some great ideas and products and Google is still my home page and my pretty much the only place I search from.

That said I don't trust them to keep anything going long term. Every time I find something useful, it gets taken away, Google Health the most recent on the chopping block. And I'm sure we can make a list of other that have fallen to the wayside. Wave of course. I even dialed 800-Goog-411 the other day to get a phone # and it was gone.

It's hard to want to invest in personalizing anything Google these days. I use to feel secure thinking my "Gmail" account would be around a while. These days I'm not so sure.

More Fronts

[alphatel]

Not only is Google taking on more than just the listed fronts (author neglected libraries, cloud computing, email, etc), but every major tech company is fighting the same fights on its fronts as well. In total, it is a thousand-front war, with only a handful of select winners at the end of the day.

Re:More Fronts

[Permutation Citizen]

Two others major segments this article ignore are advertisement serving (doubleclick) and video distribution (youtube).

This is not a "six-front war", all these services are related to each other.

Google has an advantage

[bertoelcon]

Google has a slight advantage in that none of their services other than advertising are really making money, and not many have to be as long as adverting can keep them afloat as well as it has.

Re:Google has an advantage

[ijakings]

Many of their services are built around advertising, which is a point that many seem to miss. At the end of the day google want eyeballs on their ads, and if offering x service at break even or a loss gets enough eyeballs to those ads to make a profit, they are doing well.

Obviously they can offer paid side services on top of this, like gmail for enterprise and google earth pro. Even android is about getting users on their platform, having their eyeballs where they want them.

Re:Google has an advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone else notice that Google has a lot of failed products and services?

I'm not applying a value judgement to that just yet, as it may be a byproduct of a high innovation rate and willingness to take risks. However Google has this great reputation as a winning company and yet I'm struck by how many of their products have cratered.

Recent examples would have to include Google Wave and Google Buzz. Google Books seems to have become bogged down in endless bickering.

Re:Google has an advantage

[wvmarle]

There are basically two ways to make money on the Internet: advertising, and having users pay for the service. This not counting "e-commerce" sites, which are basically not different from a traditional mail-order service with an online instead of a paper catalogue.

These days, many services are free, they are of high quality, users have come to expect such services to be free, and most are not willing to pay for it.

E-mail service: hotmal/gmail/yahoo/etc are all free, have always been, will always be. Can't make money there other than by advertising.

Social networking: Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn/etc are free, have always been, will always be. Can't make money there other than by advertising.

Search engines: AltaVista/Yahoo/Bing/Google are free, have always been, will always be. Can't make money there other than by advertising.

Slashdot is free (OK you can become paid member but not many do so). Main income is definitely from advertising - including advertising their own geek products.

And so you can go on. There are so many services available online, and most of them are available for free.

Looking back at the past decade or two, many many companies were set up (most went bust) with a free service, and the only real goal being to get as many users as possible, without business plan. Other than maybe a vague idea of advertising to those users, but often even that didn't take off well, though at the time that may have had to do more with lack of interest from advertisers. This market has matured significantly now.

Google brings out all those free services (e.g. maps with street view - the latter must cost a lot to create), with the sole purpose of attracting users, and to create new platforms for more and more targeted advertising. And many users seem to appreciate targeted advertising: when looking for coffee shops for example, it can be useful to see ads of coffee shops that are near you. Valuable advertising for those coffee shops involved as well.

The advantage Google has is not just advertising, it is that they have a complete up-and-running, well developed network of targeted advertising. They have the advertisers already. They have technology to decide which ads may be relevant to that user. And that is something a startup doesn't have yet. So a startup not only has to develop a product, they have to develop the income source, and they have to develop a name for themselves, something Google has already, they're one of the best-known brands on the Internet.

Re:Google has an advantage

[yeshuawatso]

This reminds me of an article I read a while ago. All the stuff Google creates seem less to do with monetizing those services directly and more to do with protecting their search business. I believed the author described it as a moat. Google is more than willing to give you billions of dollars of free stuff if they can continue to make tens of billions on search advertising. Truthfully, I'm not sure why they haven't been investigated for tying already. While they don't specifically require you to use their search to get all the other stuff, it's pretty damn close to the definition.

Re:Google has an advantage

[cr_nucleus]

Even android is about getting users on their platform, having their eyeballs where they want them.

I disagree, Android is about preventing a single actor (apple) to be too dominant and be able to leverage this dominance to be the sole vector of ads on a platform (as apple is planning/doing) therefore potentially preventing google to display ads on said platform.

Re:Google has an advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair though I am glad they are trying to do new things rather than being reactionary and waiting to copy someone else. Pumping money into R&D and trying new things is better than doing nothing and just giving any and all extra cash to the directors and share holders.

Yawn

[slasho81]

How is Google's situation any different than any other giant tech company? It isn't. If you're big, you're everywhere.

In other news...

[Dremth]

In other news, scientists in Kansas have completed an experiment and determined that water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, is a liquid at room temperature, and that water is, in fact, wet. We can only ponder the implications this has for the human race and life on Earth.

Business not a zero sum game

[fermion]

Business is not war. War by definition is a zero sum game. That is, war is used to distribute a resource that for all intents and purposes is fixed in quantity. For instance, war is often used to redistribute land. Now it is used to redistribute petroleum. The war on drugs redistributes drugs to the rich and powerful, leaving the poor with nothing.

Business is different. Business is about creating value where none exists. It is about taking a junk mushroom and turning it into a premium product. It is about taking a piece of land no one wants and turning it into a resort. In the process inefficient companies die, but they are not causalities of war. They are simply relics of a bad past that we are happy to see left behind.

So why is this important? If it is war then we fight to maintain market share, a perceived limited resource, which is what the American automakers diid, which is why MS is doing, which is what all those insurance companies and banks are doing. However if it is not a war then we are in a situation of an expanding and fruitful economy that will grow as we innovate. This si the world in which we have jobs and new toys. This is IBM. This is Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Corporation.

If we are at war, we do not innovate, we copy. It is the difference between Google using graph theory to create a index method different from Yahoo and Alta Vista and Google creating an phone not unlike the iPhone. It is the difference between Alta Vista that stood on market share and did not innovate, and Yahoo who understood there was room in search for more than one way to serve the customer.

Re:Business not a zero sum game

[jemmyw]

But your examples of copying are not zero sum. Android is valuable despite copying the iPhone, it's different enough, and more importantly it grows the market in a way that Apple wasn't going to. And if companies fight for market share by making their products more valuable then this is not zero sum either, it's zero sum for the competing companies, but extra value is created for their customers.

War doesn't have to be zero sum either. If it's a war over land and resources then yes, but if it's a war over political ideals then no.

Re:Business not a zero sum game

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is how it is fought as far as if it will be good for the customers. There are 2 ways to win marketshare, Method 1. Continue to add features capabilities and functionality and/or lower the cost to the point where the product is a significant step above the competition that people want to use it, ensure that if the competition wants to compete, they have to match your pace. Method 2. Stranglehold the competition, find ways to prevent the competition from developing, use legal forces/patents, create as many barriers to getting into the market or rising in the market that the opposition just can't get in the door. Regardless of if they have 10x better of a product, raise the barriers required to switch to ensure you keep marketshare.
 

Google while they may not be a saint have a tendency to lean far stronger to method 1 then method 2, which IMO even if google has been/turned dark, what they have forced all competition to do just to keep up, is good for the consumers in all fields they compete in.

Re:Business not a zero sum game

[epine]

War by definition is a zero sum game.

In the immortal words of Ricky Ricardo, "Lucy, you've got some defining to do!" This never occurred to me, but now that you mention it, I can see how it equates to zero. One guy gets shot in the trenches, lies groaning in the mud and feces holding his intestines inside his belly with a tin dinner plate. The guy who shot him survives the firefight, goes off to the nearest Asian brothel so shoot up with a grade of heroine you can only obtain in the Asian jungle. Misery on one side, bliss on the other, the perfect zero sum outcome. Now I know why the heroine habit is so difficult to kick: it's the zero-sum compliment to lying in feces and mud holding your guts inside your belly with a tin dinner plate. Potent stuff. Man, I gotta get me some of that.

It's certainly true that conflict flares up around primary constraints. In some cases the constraints are created by war itself. I'm sure Lawrence Waterhouse could jot down and solve the differential equations as a short digression from a tedious moment. Somehow I don't think his solution, valid as it might be, would have won him the Nobel prize in economics.

I've always figured from the perspective of a shiny new officer's uniform, that the principle spoils of war were babalicious war widows back in his home town. From her perspective, after the waterworks ends, it's zero sum, isn't it? The new man in her life had the wits to come out on top. That's almost an upgrade, even.

Re:Business not a zero sum game

[colinrichardday]

War by definition is a zero sum game.

By what definition? I would consider war to be a negative-sum game.

Re:Business not a zero sum game

[gfody]

with these social products it's more like a war over land than doing business. think of social community as a place that's currently occupied by facebook. the fixed quantity resource are all the eyeballs using the product and the data they generate.

Re:Business not a zero sum game

[wvmarle]

But your examples of copying are not zero sum. Android is valuable despite copying the iPhone, it's different enough, and more importantly it grows the market in a way that Apple wasn't going to.

That was a new market. Banks, insurances, Microsoft all operate in a more-or-less saturated market. Big difference. Android can grow alongside iPhone. Linux can only grow by taking market share from other companies like Microsoft, and thus threatening Microsoft directly.

War doesn't have to be zero sum either. If it's a war over land and resources then yes, but if it's a war over political ideals then no.

War tends to be a negative-sum business. Remember: war has no winners, only losers. The "winner" is just the one that lost less.

Re:Business not a zero sum game

[labrats5]

This is bullshit. War is not always a zero sum game. hell, war is very rarely a zero-sum game. Nuclear war is war; a war in which everyone loses everything. That's not zero-sum, that's an impossibly negative sum. Or how about religious wars? Did the Christian s and Muslims fight over money? kind of. Land, sort of. But what religions really fight over is the hearts and minds of people. That's the resource they need to live. The Christians and Muslims fought against each other for years and they just kept getting stronger and bigger and stronger still. Clearly a net positive not a zero-sum game.

So what I'm basically accusing you of is being a pseudo-intellectual bullshit artist who obsesses over his false sense of semantics like a dowdy housewife in a kitchen. I don't really care about Macheads or Fandroids or whatever else people call them, but its people like you that make me want to punch the internet in the face.

TL;DR if you use the words 'by definition' in anything you write, you better be damn sure it's true or else I'll break in through your window swinging on a rope.

Re:Business not a zero sum game

[colinrichardday]

Does that still make up for the loss of life and destruction?

Re:Business not a zero sum game

[RivenAleem]

With the current population higher than ever in history, yes, I think advancements have made up for a few deaths along the way. Might not be a popular view, but there you have it, we have a better quality of life today, because our descendants were aggressive bastards.

Re:Business not a zero sum game

[Gorath99]

War by definition is a zero sum game.

By what definition? I would consider war to be a negative-sum game.

Only if you don't consider the consequences of not going to war. For instance, I'm very glad that France and Britain declared war on the Axis. I have little doubt that the world would have been a worse place now if they hadn't.

Re:Business not a zero sum game

[colinrichardday]

And how many wars in history would have met such criteria? And even when it is the case, it means that the war wasn't a zero-sum game.

I believe a better example would have the Falklands War. The Argentinian government wasn't as evil as the Nazis, but the cost of getting rid of them was lower.

Re:Business not a zero sum game

[colinrichardday]

But (to address both of you) overpopulation might spur innovation more than war does.

Re:Business not a zero sum game

[gottabeme]

I think you meant antecedents or ancestors. :)

Re:Business not a zero sum game

[RivenAleem]

Yeah, totally meant that, dohp.

But then, humans are currently aggressive bastards, and our descendants are likely to be aggressive bastards too.

Re:Buzzing

[larry bagina]

don't forget orkut.

In case you don't want to read the article

[phantomfive]

Here are the six fronts listed in the article:

The Browser Front - chrome/IE/Firefox etc
The Mobile Front - Android vs iPhone vs all others
The Search Front - Duh
The Local Front - Groupon, Daily Deals, Foursquare, etc. The Social Front - trying to kill Facebook
The Enterprise Front - Google apps vs Office, Google mail vs Exchange, etc.

Add some filler text and you have the article.

Re:In case you don't want to read the article

[obarthelemy]

The interesting thing is that is almost all cases, Google are invading, not defending. They are one the few companies to have the skills, the vision and the money to try and shake up markets. I wish them well, and with others would be as active/aggressive. Also, because they are active on so many fronts, they can fail at one without catastrophic consequences - except Search !

Looking at the list of the biggest tech companies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_global_technology_companies):
There's a lot of heavily hardware-oriented companies. Some of them are kinda trying, but that's rather outside of their purview.
MS: I'm assuming they lack vision more than skills or money.
Sony: lack all of the above
SAP and Oracle are purely "entreprise"
Apple are trying, and rather successful

Re:In case you don't want to read the article

[bonch]

Slashdot in 2001: "Microsoft is evil. They're trying to leverage their success with Windows to take everybody down. They want to conquer everything and have you using Microsoft-branded operating systems, browsers, phones, webjournals, email, and more."

Slashdot in 2011: "Google is awesome. They're leveraging the success of their search engine to enter these markets with their fantastic vision. I can't wait to use Google-branded operating systems, browsers, phones, blogs, email, and more."

Re:In case you don't want to read the article

[laffer1]

Google and Microsoft are quite similar. No matter what I do, there are one or two products that I end up using or needing anyway. It just takes one event for people to change their mind about tech companies. For most people, Google hasn't done anything wrong yet. That's the difference between Microsoft and Google. I think in most people's eyes, Microsoft's pricing and activation as well as failures with vista have been more of a reputation fail than the antitrust trial or IE ever were. Young people don't think of Microsoft as fun or cool either. No one wants a windows phone.

The problem will be for google to stay "young". There's a whole group of graduating seniors that have grown up with social networking for almost half their life now. (counting blogging) Google + is a huge improvement to facebook, but it's old hat to them. Smart phones are still somewhat trendy, but I mostly hear older people buying tablets/pads.

Re:In case you don't want to read the article

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

The difference: MS was trying to force people to use their new products. Google is creating good products and inviting people to use the

Looks like Google's marketing was successful.

Re:In case you don't want to read the article

[brokeninside]

it is interesting that most of the territory is an offensive strategy for Google.

But, even more interesting to me, is that they are serious fronts. The history of the IT industry is absolutely strewn with the corpses of companies that tried such strategies (e.g. the all fronts wars initiated by Novell and Netscape against Microsoft). But while I know many people that had hoped that Novell or Netscape would dethrone Microsoft with the respective software stacks, I don't know many people that thought that they could actually pull it off.

Google seems to be a serious contender in way that no one else has been for a long time.

Re:In case you don't want to read the article

[a_hanso]

Based on what I've read, here's how I perceive it. I may have misread, so feel free to correct.

Browser Front: Google: Winning, MS: Losing, Mozilla et al.: Stagnating

Mobile Front: Google: Attacking, Apple: Holding wins, MS: Losing

Search Front: Google: Holding wins, MS (Bing): Attacking but not doing much damage

Local Front: No idea

Enterprise Front: Google: Attacking but not doing much damage, MS et al. : Stagnating, Linux et al. : Slowly advancing

Re:In case you don't want to read the article

[a_hanso]

Social Front: Facebook: Dominating, Google: Repeated, but abortive attacks

Re:In case you don't want to read the article

[phantomfive]

I have no statistics, but anecdotal evidence leads me to believe Google is starting to replace exchange. Of course, enterprise is a huge space, with a lot of services that no one company can cover completely.

Re:In case you don't want to read the article

[phantomfive]

My explanation of this difference is that Microsoft made crap. There was no question that Linux was better than WindowsME, for example. In those days Microsoft really did suck, they made all our lives miserable, because we had to use their stuff for work. On top of that, they actively attacked open source groups.

On the other hand, Google makes cool things. They also give it away free. In general, we are not forced to use it (I'm forced to use gmail at work, but I can use Thunderbird). They don't hate open source, and from time to time even contribute to open source.

In a nutshell, Microsoft tried to win by forcing inferior products on us. Google is trying to win by creating better products. I think that will make people like you more. Also, most Slashdotters don't seem to actually care about open source.

Re:In case you don't want to read the article

[ergean]

I have yet to see a place where Google applied the embrace, extend, extinguish strategy that Microsoft used everywhere.

Re:In case you don't want to read the article

[obarthelemy]

Would you prefer
- Browser: IE, FFox, Safari, Opera
- Mobile: iOS, Symbian, Windows
- Search: Altavista
- Local: Groupon
- Social: Fbook
- Entreprise: Office

? I know I wouldn't.

Re:In case you don't want to read the article

[mcvos]

It's true, though. You're never forced to use Google's products, and they don't punish you for choosing someone else's products. Google loves to do business with its competitors.

Microsoft tried to ram their software down our throats, for example by demanding that OEMs sell no other OS than theirs. For a long time, nobody liked having to use Windows, but we had no choice, because all our favourite software ran only on Windows. Choosing a better OS doesn't help you much if there's no software for it. And we even had to pay MS for something we didn't want, but had no option but to use. That sort of thing really fuels the hate.

Google, on the other hand, gives us what we want, and they give it to us for free. And they keep making it more awesome. There's nothing preventing anyone from offering the exact same services that Google is offering, other than maybe a lack of skill or desire to do that. Nobody has to use Google+, Android, Google's search engine, etc. There are plenty of alternatives. Yet people seem to prefer Google. It's convenient and it's free. It's hard to say no to that.

Re:In case you don't want to read the article

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

You're making my point for me.

Business *is* war

[nurb432]

And treating it as anything else gets you a fast track one-way trip to bankruptcy.

Just doeskin have all the killing and maiming you get in a "traditional" war ( normally.. )

Re:Business *is* war

[Locutus]

the war Google is fighting is really one of protecting and expanding it's ad revenue generating space. Microsoft is out paying to get BING used as the default search( RIM, Facebook, etc ). If those companies were not out trying to block Google from selling ads they probably would not be fighting so hard to get into all those other places. Look at the phone segment. Apple did a great job on their phone but they were exclusive and expensive. so Google comes in and provides a platform for a huge segment of the market Apple was leaving out and Microsoft was floundering in.

What's really interesting here is that this is a war to block a new paradigm in software and services revenue generation. Google makes money from ad generation and they can share that with the hardware vendors. Mozilla would not be anything like it is today if it were not for the $50+ million they got annually from Google as ad revenue sharing. This scares the shit out of Microsoft, Sony, Apple, the telecoms, etc. They do not want to see their revenue streams diverting to a mechanism they do not control and they are not competent at. The whole Nortel Networks patent buy was basically the old guard blocking the new kid from building a protection wall against them. Right now, you fight patent litigation with more patent litigation but you have to have a patent pool to fight with.

I for one welcome my now overlords since the old overlords have shown they are not interesting in anything but control and locking us into and onto their products. Products which have stagnated when they have had that control. This is war, it just is not a conventional war and I think Google has to get out into those other areas only because companies like Microsoft have been documented it that they are out to put Google down. Not unlike how Bill and Steve decided Netscape must go, Microsoft has decided that Google must go. They are fighting, they have to fight because if they don't Microsoft will shut them down like they shut down Netscape. IMO

LoB

Re:Chess

[JMJimmy]

Except the Chinese are playing Go.

The sad thing is that people see these as 6 different fronts. It's 2 fronts. Internet services and access. Google is smart in that they toss darts in the services area to see what sticks and run with it. If it doesn't stick, abandon, and try again.

Don't worry

[Daimanta]

As long as Google doesn't invade Russia in the winter everything will be allright.

Re:Don't worry

[grouchomarxist]

No one invades Russia in the winter. They invade hoping Russia will surrender before winter. It doesn't work.

Re:Don't worry

[Anonymous Coward]

In communist Russia, winter invades you.

Re:Don't worry

[greg1104]

It's also important they don't get involved in a land war in Asia.

Re:Don't worry

[err head]

The Mongols invaded Russia in the winter so that they would have an easier time moving supplies on the frozen rivers with sledges. No player in the tech sector is as bad ass as Mongols of course.

Re:Don't worry

[mcvos]

It was no different in Tsarist Russia.

War number 7

[countertrolling]

Let's hand over the "War on Terrorism" No doubt they could deal with it more competently than the government. Their spy powers are unmatched. They can redirect all communications to some honeypot. I believe there's even a Google jail...

Re:Chess

[bonch]

People said the same thing about Microsoft. Google is a lot like Microsoft used to be, actually. The similarities are eerie.

Re:it's not war!!!

[Kalriath]

Google is not fighting any war here. All they are trying to do, give a more ad-infested piece of software free of recognisable cost to consumers. So, stop painting that google is on a war or something. We all know that most of the crappy software out there can be done with more ads.

FTFY. Don't delude yourself that Google gives a crap about you, or making functional software for free. They care about slamming their ads in front of you, and hiding the actual cost of their services behind that "free" moniker.

Re:Buzzing

[Guppy]

I even dialed 800-Goog-411 the other day to get a phone # and it was gone.

Yup, they shut that down after getting enough voice search data. 1-800-Bing-411 should still be up, though.
     

Re:WAR?

[bonch]

Thats why they got where they are. By NOT worrying about what everyone else is doing and trying to 'metoo' like microsoft does on everything.

The last few years have seen Google do almost nothing else but worry about what everyone else is doing, from the iPhone to Bing to Facebook. That little company from ten years ago with the minimalist search engine is gone, and in its place is an advertising behemoth with an interest in releasing as many products as possible to harvest as much personal information as possible.

Just like Microsoft was always trying to preserve the relevance of Windows and its API, Google is constantly trying to preserve the relevance of its advertising network. Facebook and Twitter threaten that because they have become the web for a lot of people (especially Facebook), which is why you get stuff like Google+ to try to keep people on their data network.

Re:it's not war!!!

[zippthorne]

Indeed. If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product...

Re:Odd sort of war

[bonch]

It's the old Microsoft strategy of releasing a lukewarm 1.0 (in Google's case, it's a "beta") and iterating over it while leveraging the dominance of an existing product. Microsoft was always trying to keep Windows relevant, and Google is always trying to keep their advertising network relevant. For example, Facebook has practically become the web for a lot of people, so Google's response is Google+, just like how Netscape was threatening to become the operating system, so Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows.

War? Pics, please ...

[jc42]

Am I the one one here who thinks it's time to start reigning in this use of "war" for situations in which nobody is dying?

We should be demanding that the authors of such propaganda be required to document instances of rape, pillage and/or murder by the participants in such purported "wars". If they can't document google's bombing raids, etc., then they should be required to edit their reports to use more accurate terms for what google is actually doing to their victims.

(Actually, a lot of us would like to see the videos of google's acts of war against their opponents. Can we get them posted to youtube? That would certainly end a log of the fanboyism we see here with respect to google. ;-)

Gibber

[ConfusedVorlon]

The first two fronts are misunderstood by the author. I didn't bother reading further.

Front 1) Chrome
He implies that Google is in the browser battle to control the browser and get everybody over to chrome. In fact - google is in the browser battle to raise the game. They're totally happy if ie maintains market share as long as ie does a better job at javascript and html5 so that users can use gmail, google docs, etc.

Google are clearly winning here - all the browsers have significantly improved their javascript performance and standards compliance since Chrome made them start competing again.

Front 2) Android
He implies the reason Android doesn't have the developer support is due to fragmentation of devices. Completely wrong - the reason Android doesn't have developer support is that Google haven't trained everyone to buy apps, and so the financial rewards for developers are way lower.

Apple gets your payment method on day 1, and makes it easy for you to buy stuff with successful instant fulfilment. Google has a crappy dysfunctional checkout system and make no attempts to collect your payment details until you decide to bite the bullet and buy an app. At that point, they make the process painful and unsatisfying so that you are put off from ever trying again.

Re:Gibber

[petman]

Apple gets your payment method on day 1, and makes it easy for you to buy stuff with successful instant fulfilment. Google has a crappy dysfunctional checkout system and make no attempts to collect your payment details until you decide to bite the bullet and buy an app. At that point, they make the process painful and unsatisfying so that you are put off from ever trying again.

I actually prefer Google's way. It helps me save money by discouraging impulse buying. After a year of using Android, the number of apps I've purchased from the market can be counted with the fingers of my two hands. OTOH, I've heard of people spending hundreds, even thousands, within a week of getting an iPhone/iPad, because it's just so easy.

Re:Gibber

[wvmarle]

Google are clearly winning here - all the browsers have significantly improved their javascript performance and standards compliance since Chrome made them start competing again.

I'd say browser competition was quite hot already with Firefox taking over a huge chunk of IE's market, and Safari being released for Windows. Chrome just heated it up a bit more.

And anyway that's a great thing I'd say. I'd love to see a world with 3, 4 major browsers, each having at least some 15-20% market share, no more than 50% for any single one. That forces them to follow standards as it's too much to expect web developers to develop browser-specific. Actually considering the latest browser usage statistics we're quite close to such an "ideal world" already.

Re:Gibber

[kobaz]

Google has a crappy dysfunctional checkout system and make no attempts to collect your payment details until you decide to bite the bullet and buy an app. At that point, they make the process painful and unsatisfying so that you are put off from ever trying again.

Huh? Are you referring to the app market or something else? The google mobile market is painless and easy to buy apps. You hit buy and it charges your card on file. You get the app. Done and done. What could be easier?

Re:Gibber

[shutdown -p now]

But that was GP's point. It's precisely why there are more quality apps on iOS.

Re:Gibber

[ConfusedVorlon]

it would be great if it worked that way for everyone.

I'm consistently getting emails from users who don't understand why their app isn't downloading (answer - sometimes the market just takes hours to approve the purchase and allow the download)

Lots of users find their cards not working for unclear reasons

And the biggest point is getting that card on file. You jumped the hoops, it all works for you and now you buy stuff. A lot of people get put off by the hoops - or it just doesn't work for them.

Re:Gibber

[ConfusedVorlon]

This may be true for one developer - but that doesn't make it true for good developers generally.

I know a bunch of developers who sell their apps on both iOS and Android - generally, there is about a factor of 10 difference in the revenue. (Less on Android!).

This developer clearly did well, and grabbed the interest of the Android market. That's great - but it doesn't represent the experience of most developers.

You can also look at it a different way;

-A game which is clearly one of the very best available on Android makes about the same as it does on iOS where it is up against a lot of stiff competition.

-The game on android which is getting 9x the gameplay (3 times as many downloads, and about 3x the usage) generates revenue which looks like it is very similar after the first 6 weeks.

Re:Gibber

[ConfusedVorlon]

== so they get essentially steer the priorities of the entire market.

yup, that was the general point I was making. JS, standards, html5 are just specific examples of the more general strategy.

== With Android, again the point is not the app sales, otherwise Amazon would be banned from Android market once they made their store.

You are right about the general point; Android is about making sure that other folks don't get to take over the mobile internet. However I think google realise that apps are important as the key differentiator of the platform. In order to get great apps, google need to make it so that developers can make money. Google have explicitly recognised this:
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/google-disappointed-with-android-app-sales-923912

Re:The problem with Google ... they aren't innovat

[strength_of_10_men]

The biggest problem with Google is that they are not innovators ... just copycats.

To that, I and millions of others say... who cares? Why is copying or buying a concept such a bad thing? As long as they offer a service that is superior, why does it matter who came up with the original concept? Where would the GUI desktop be now if Apple hadn't "innovated" it from Xerox?

That's just the nature of competition and the free market. If the original idea isn't sufficient, why should I have to suffer it if there's a better executed "copy" from somewhere else? And if the copy isn't good, wouldn't the market decide its fate?

Surprise, surprise...

[QuietLagoon]

A large, global company has competition. What a surprise. Oh, what will Google do? Whatever will they do?

.
It looks like far too many people are accustomed to the days when Microsoft's monopoly ruled and crippled the tech industry. Fortunately, those days seem as distant as a Windows mobile device with a 50% marketshare.....

I, for one, welcome competition for google, and any other company that becomes a global powerhouse.

Re:Surprise, surprise...

[antdude]

I just hope Google doesn't become a monopoly in these areas. Compeition is good! Let the war continue. ;)

Re:countertrolling & the trolltalk.com crew

[tomhudson]

The only sick individual here is you, APK (the "hosts file guy")

Re:The problem with Google ... they aren't innovat

[sgbett]

Uh, search...

Re:it's not war!!!

[0123456]

They care about slamming their ads in front of you, and hiding the actual cost of their services behind that "free" moniker.

And butt-raping any privacy you think you might still have.

War is not always a zero sum game

[brokeninside]

It can be, but it doesn't have to be.

Imagine a small beligerant country that mounts an attack on a superpower. The superpower retaliates and does no small amount of damage to the small country. The superpower wins by using the smaller country as an example of what happens when you screw around with the 800 pound gorilla on the block. The small country wins by having increased prestige among the countries that view the superpower as an aggressor.

Numerous articles about this sort of situation have been written in Foreign Policy and other serious journals. One of the most interesting was Lynch's article that used the public spat between JayZ and The Game as an analogue to tensions between the US and Iran.

But asymetric situations are just one non-zero sum way that war can play out. Imagine two superpowers along the lines of the totalitarian state in Orwell's 1984. Both profit from the state of perpetual warfare against the other because the war is a necessary condition of the form of social control used by the state. Lest you think this an implausible thought experiment, consider what would happen to the North Korean regime if it were not at war with South Korea.

Pet peeve

[Brannon]

it's supposed to be "for all intensive purposes"

Re:Pet peeve

[dwightk]

you might want to edit this:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/en/wiki/for_all_intensive_purposes

Re:Pet peeve

[Paradise Pete]

it's supposed to be "for all intensive purposes"

Actually that's just an old wise tale.

Re:Pet peeve

[aug24]

Fuck off. Since 1547:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for_all_intents_and_purposes

Re:Pet peeve

[Paradise Pete]

OK, you made me laugh. That's pretty funny.

Are you certain that you don't mean ...

[brokeninside]

"for all intended purposes"?

The GP's phrasing "for all intents and purposes" actually makes more sense than "for all intensive purposes" unless one is using a very narrow and academic defintion of "intensive" that is derived from "intension" rather than being a description of relative extent.

Re:The problem with Google ... they aren't innovat

[twidarkling]

Is still not better, just what you're used to using now. Honestly, I flip between Google Search, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, depending on what I'm looking for, and how I'm feeling. Bing gives me most of what Google does, but with slightly different relevance algorithms, which is nice, since Google sometimes has a rather insane amount of irrelevant pages that have been GSEO (Google Search Engine Optimized), but they've not been BSEO'd. DuckDuckGo is a little quirky, but good.

Re:Poor Liddle Dimwitted Cocksucker

[twidarkling]

What a fucking loser.

Pot, meet kettle.

Swiss Army Knife

[retroworks]

If Google was a pocket knife, it would still fit in my pocket. Turning this upside down, searching and locating is common in browsers, advertising, networking, search, and crosses over multiple devices. The article makes it sound like people ten years from now will still treat all of these as different fields. Tech companies will be more like Wal-Mart, and less like drug stores, soda shops, butchers and cheese shops.

Re:Buzzing

[AmigaHeretic]

I'm sorry, but your post looks a lot like FUD.

Why? Because they are things you didn't use?

Google Notebook? Some of us actually used that.

Google Video? Some of us used that too. Sure we could move to Youtube or Vimeo or 100 sites now. Point is Google Video ended.
Wave? Yeah, it was never huge, but I got a lot of people signed up and had quite a few good Waves.
Yes, I use/used Google Health. So what? Again I get burned.

There's more I never used. Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Catalog Search, Mashup, Lively, Google Answers, etc that I never used, but just goes to show they are not afraid to move on. Which is probably good for them, just bad for me.

Re:countertrolling & the trolltalk.com crew

[wikileaks]

Holy shit, what the fuck is wrong with you?
http://www.google.com/search?q=Alexander+Peter+Kowalski
You are completely batshit insane and out of your mind. Please take these ridiculous ramblings to a different forum.

Re:Poor Liddle Dimwitted

[twidarkling]

Hmm, quite interesting. I still find the other AC's post hilarious on a hypocritical scale, but the added perspective is useful. Thank you for the considered, informative reply. While I freely admit I'm very tired of the prevailing attitude I constantly see around the 'net that Google can do no wrong, I certainly don't think them worse than most any other company, and better than a great deal of them. Constant demonstrated antipathy towards any company is rarely helpful.

Re:Buzzing

[AmigaHeretic]

Gamble on new, experimental, unpopular, or auxiliary services if you must

I guess that's exactly my point on this Google+ and the "Social Front" the article talks about.

Do I bother investing time and setting up Google+ and investing personal time in it? What I've learned with Google is wait and see else don't be surprised if all the time you've invested sort of goes "POOF" and turns into a... well... 'Cloud', of smoke that is.

Forget this...

[AliasMarlowe]

No matter how much might you wield, you can't make someone forget something.

Strictly speaking, electroconvulsive "therapy" (especially bilateral with high currents) can effectively destroy memories. Luckily, there are legal restrictions on these procedures. But let's not give the intellectual property fiends another bad idea.

Only search matters

[Animats]

Google revenue: 94% ads. Ad revenue: 70% ads on search pages, 30% ads elsewhere (Adsense, YouTube, etc.). That's what matters.

If Google does anything for which they charge customers money, the customers will expect support. Google hates providing support. They gave up selling Android handsets when they discovered that unhappy customers would call them. Even the rare Google business-to-business products, like the Google Search Appliance, were unsupported. (If it broke during warranty, they shipped you a new one.) This limits Google to ad-supported business lines. Since they already dominate the one really profitable ad-supported business line, search, any area into which they expand is less profitable than the one they're in. So expansion reduces ROI and stock price.

Getting into "social" doesn't help much. Facebook is dinky compared to Google. Facebook has hit its peak size, and it still generates an order of magnitude less revenue than Google.

Re:Only search matters

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the thing about social though... look at how sticky FB is, they must really suck at marketing to advertisers to have such low revenue. If Google+ were to match them in size, the potential revenue is far higher than anything FB has ever seen. Google maintains better relationships to both advertisers and consumers and profits for it.

And one on privacy..

[cheros]

As far as I can see, privacy seems to interfere with their business model as well..

Re:More Fronts (aka "Google, you broke my heart")

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem is that suits run Google now and nerd rage will eventually kill Google. I stopped using all Google services, found serviceable alternatives, and actively block their javascript and XSS domains in my browser just because they decided to add an extra click to the logout button in GMail. It costs me $0 to do this. Honestly, I hope something really awful happens to the company because the GMail decision alone portends utter stupidity at the highest levels of management.

To win a war, you have to have people who really love you (or hate the competition) fighting on your side. Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, Apple - I've been pissed off by many companies, but Google is the only one that has reached active hate levels in my book. Perhaps it's the crushingly ironic use of "Don't Be Evil" which has lead to Wall Street profits out the wazoo while they can't even get a fucking webmail client working properly (hotmail has been around over a goddamn decade). So they can go rot. I'll be jerking it to pics I found on bing.com and forwarding 419 scams through yahoo mail from now on, thank you very much.

Two words : "Lock In"

[DrYak]

Lock In : That's the single biggest difference which sets Microsoft and Google worlds apart (and places Apple somewhere in the middle, explaining the strange love/hate relationship that /. is having with them).

During their whole Microsoft, they have been constantly trying to do one thing : To force you to use (and pay for) their products, and to make sure that you don't have any other viable alternative, so their products (and their prices) is the only way to go.
They lived at a time when the computing paradigm shifted from single hardware vendors (big irons like IBM) for a situation where hardware vendors are more or less made irrelevant by commodity hardware, and it's the software which is running on the hardware which is the key. And worked hard making sure that there's no other choice for the software, using doubtful tactics.

Google on the other hand, builds heavily on open standard, making sure that you're never locked into their products. And very often, they rely on open-source components, they play nice with upstream, and release some of their products open source.
So Okay, they make a Google-branded browser - Chrome. But, first it's opensource (Chromium), so if you don't like it, you're free to fork it, modify it, etc. Also, it's running on open standards. It runs on HTML5/CSS/javascript, etc. If you don't want to use google's browser there are plenty other browser, which all support the same standards (more or less. There's still the video codec patent problem...) and some of them similarly free/libe (like Firefox). Any browser could do its job (browsing the web) well. No lock-in. Unlike the situations which use to be with microsoft (ActiveX, broken standards, etc. A website designed for IE6 isn't guaranteed to work in anything else).

Same for the OS: ChromeOS is available for free, open source (Chromium OS), based on open and freely available components (Linux). You aren't forced to use it. It's mostly designed to be light-weight OS with which to browse the web. Lots of other OSes could do the same jobs. Include other Linux distributions (Ubuntu, openSUSE) or even Microsoft Windows.

Phones : Android. Again opensource. Could be licensed (as it is by the bigprofile phone makers like HTC and similar). But is also available for free (countless cheap asian no-name smartphones, countless ARM hacking projects, etc.) Slightly less easily replaceable (Android Apps work only on android. They are not standard Linux applications).

Mail/Chat communication: again. They are built with open standard. Because it's standard e-Mail, you can exchange letters with any other mail server. Because the chat is build around XMPP you can chat with any other compatible chat server. You can decide to use GMail and GTalk for mail and chat, but you could use anything else, like your ISP's mailbox and jabber.org resp. Same to access them : Google has a nice web-application, but you can access these services with anything else : any IMAP client (like Thunderbird) will do the trick, any XMPP client (like Pidgin), too.

etc.

Google is typical for the current generation in the computer world : openstandard and free/libre software, is slowly making the old software-monopolies business model irrelevant. Sure Google produces software, but because it inter-operate nicely with anything else, you're not forced to use their solution. The new key is service. That's where the real meat is. That's where the future monopolies and big evils will be.
As Google has already an enormous amount of both accumulated data and experience, the entry-barrier is rather hard for anyone wanting to compete in the search field (no matter which software is used to access it) (even other companie which have been in the field for some time have difficulties
As Facebook has achieved critical mass and is the network where most of the people are, the entry-barrier is really hard for other FB-wannabe (Google themselves failed a few time trying to launch their social platform. We'll see if G+ fares any bet

Re:Two words : "Lock In"

[denyingbelial]

I really think this wall of text says everything that needs to be said about the issue. Yes, google is building all these things with hope of revenue but they're not forcing anybody's hand. Microsoft is notorious for trying to herd it's users and bundle them together into a small enclosure where they only have access to products, hardware, and services that have been microsoft approved. They treat everything else as if it were somehow inherently evil, and feed a sense of "we're the good guys, we'll keep you safe, the outside world is dangerous" to it's users. Microsoft doesn't give room to breath or allow for the creative spirit to grow; it creates boxes from which to better milk you dry (all the while telling you it's for your good). They're business minded, but they have no mind for community or the human spirit of computing.

Google, however, has often given back to the community with open source releases. They host the "Summer of code" every year, supporting the open source community. Ok, they've made their faux-pas (there was a debate, for instance, about google stealing the idea of crowd-sourcing for google maps from openstreetmap) but in general, they do not vulture around smaller companies, they don't buy out competitiors for the sake of bleeding them dry and leaving an empty husk behind, they don't turn their back on the community.

Re:Buzzing

[hairyfeet]

And once upon a time nobody would have thought about having a database in anything but DBASE, or using a browser that wasn't Netscape...your point?

If something falls out of favor or doesn't become a hit, even if people are using it, Google WILL pull the plug. As a business this is probably a damned smart move, they probably have someone crunching the numbers and making sure they get X ROI for each project they keep, and that is their right to do as they will.

But don't pretend that the folks using those services Google shitcanned weren't affected, as they were. I had several favorite little clips that I would link to that were hosted on Google video, now those are gone so anybody who comes up on one of those past posts isn't gonna know WTF the post was about. The other guy was using their 411 and Wave. Is it gonna end our worlds that they are gone? No but it certainly doesn't make the day brighter by having a service we were using just disappear one day.

And don't forget that once upon a time it was Yahoo everywhere, hell I still see more folks set to the Yahoo Portal than I do the Google search page around here. Just because something is popular, even insanely popular right now doesn't mean it can't disappear tomorrow. Just ask all those folks who had Geocities pages.

Re:countertrolling & the trolltalk.com crew

[WhitetailKitten]

Mod me flamebait or offtopic of you would like, mods, but I think it's worth the possible karma hit to say this:

APK, shut the fuck up and find a hobby that does not involve the Internet.

*ahem* There. That feels much better.

Re:countertrolling & the trolltalk.com crew

[mcvos]

I think he also has a few other targets. No idea if he posts this every time they post, but it's definitely getting rather annoying. I fear he's a real person and has some serious psychological problems that are better dealt with in some other way.