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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

Incontheivable.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

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: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.

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

[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.

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

[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

[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: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.

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.

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.

Pet peeve

[Brannon]

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

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

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: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.