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Are Google's Best Days Behind It?
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister questions whether slowing product development, legal woes, and rising bureaucracy will signal trying times ahead for Google. 'With Google's rapid growth have come new challenges. It faces intense competition in all of its major markets, even as it enters new ones. Its newer initiatives have often struggled to reach profitability. It must answer multiple ongoing legal challenges, to say nothing of antitrust probes in the United States and Europe. Privacy advocates accuse it of running roughshod over individual rights. As a result, it's becoming more cautious and risk-averse. But worst of all, as it grows ever larger and more cumbersome, it may be losing its appeal to the highly educated, impassioned workers that power its internal knowledge economy.'"
No.
That is the question.
They are, and it's been noted several times here on slashdot too. Google isn't even the market leader in search within Russia or China, they never got anywhere near where Baidu and Yandex are.
Google+ vs. Facebook, and why Google+ will fail
internal buzzword economy
When it stops being fun, it's all downhill.
If you define best days as rapid growth and free spirit, yes. Growth has to end eventually and at Google's rate it was only a matter of time before they bought and renamed Greece as Google Country.
This question comes up every year. This is just a typical shit-stirring piece, trying to round up pageviews and clickthroughs.
If your article's headline is a question and the answer is "No", don't bother publishing it. It's like journalistic masturbation, you're doing a service to no one but yourself..
No. People have been saying this about Google for the past 5+ years. The difference between Google and Microsoft is that Google has maintained the mindset of a startup. Things like 20% time will always insure that Google has a fresh set of ideas brewing and working their way up.
I remember people saying the same thing about Apple in the era before Steve Jobs returned.
What product development? Almost all of Google's newest "product development" has been acquisitions. From Android to Google Earth to Blogger to Picasa to WebM, etc.
Is this another of those Facebook's funded FUD articles? Just saying...
"that power its internal knowledge economy."
Google is an advertising firm FIRST; a search engine, etc. ad inifinitum, SECOND.
Yours In Novosibirsk,
Kilgore Trout
Best days as a search engine? Probably, yes. Best days as an advertising revenue machine? Probably not.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Once they canned this awesome new product I knew that they might be heading downhill. Google has already created amazing new products and has the ability to create more, but, as usual, the government is getting in the way.
Today the search giant's full-time head count is almost 30,000 employees. It has offices in 42 countries on six continents. In terms of market capitalization, it's bigger than Ford, GM, Starbucks, FedEx, United Airlines, and Viacom combined.
You could guess this from the amount of clutter that has appeared on all of their services. How long before we end up with a nice corporate nightmare like Yahoo...
At this stage in the game, it can't be said whether or not Google can turn things around, but it is quite certain that the direction of things at the moment is not the best for its users. Google has put out many useful services that many people use out there. (Personally, I just use search and though I do have a gmail account, I don't really use it...) But lately, Google has been tying things together with their services and now this Google+ thing really worries people.
Perhaps the minds of the masses haven't been made yet, but I am always cautious when it comes to marketers and advertisers and Google is definitely one of those.
I think this tying together of services is a way of locking in and firmly identifying its users. Their push against pseudonymity/anonymity has me and many others worried.
I have noticed on my home webserver that I have had a lot of spider traffic lately form the Baidu search engine, and very little from the googlebot. From my perspective it looks like the competition is ramping up its search engine database building...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Google was big flashy new and exciting.
Now it isn't.
They might recapture that excitement (as Apple did, or as Chrysler does every few years)
Or they might not.
There are still many big, first rate companies that are doing great things, they just don't make headlines like they used to.
Are IBMs best days behind it? Sure it isn't the single all powerful ruler of computers, but neither is it a withering shell of what it once was.
They seem to be suffering from Microsoft disease. Too many managers? A golden goose that makes them think they need to expand everywhere? Don't know, don't care, but they've spread themselves thin trying to take on Apple, Microsoft, Facebook.
How amusing. You do realize that all of their advertising relies on the search engine, which is what Google is (and was) founded on?
And let him show a better place than google for tech employees at this moment. 'losing its appeal to tech workers' my ass.
actually, what is behind is tech journalism's best days, apparently. since they started to making up arguments out of asses.
Read radical news here
and so does your grammar and knowledge of the tech sector. Cheers :-)
While Google's are just in their infancy.
And I remember when a major tech magazine had a cover touting Microsoft's NT server and saying "Unix is Dead". Actually, the magazine died first.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
>It faces intense competition in all of its major markets,
It does?
There's Google, and then there's Bing, and Bing isn't eating any of Google's market share. Not in search and not in selling ads.
Everything else may as well be Cuil.
5 Cuils: You ask for a hamburger, I give you a hamburger. You raise it to your lips and take a bite. Your eye twitches involuntarily. Across the street a father of three falls down the stairs. You swallow and look down at the hamburger in your hands. I give you a hamburger. You swallow and look down at the hamburger in your hands. You cannot swallow. There are children at the top of the stairs. A pickle shifts uneasily under the bun. I give you a hamburger. You look at my face, and I am pleading with you. The children are crying now. You raise the hamburger to your lips, tears stream down your face as you take a bite. I give you a hamburger. You are on your knees. You plead with me to go across the street. I hear only children's laughter. I give you a hamburger. You are screaming as you fall down the stairs. I am your child. You cannot see anything. You take a bite of the hamburger. The concrete rushes up to meet you. You awake with a start in your own bed. Your eye twitches involuntarily. I give you a hamburger. As you kill me, I do not make a sound. I give you a hamburger.
--
BMO
Don't matter how good it is, pony will D-I-E !! And the other will REJOYCE !! like it is 1999 in a little red coravet !!
Is this another Facebook funded Burson-Marsteller smear campaign against Google??
I switched to bing for most of my searches because it usually gets me links I want and not some local copy of the original article. I think Google searches are too localised and too much centered around my search history among other things. I'm always logged in as I have mail account with them and logging out and in to that to perform searches is a pain and not only that but it still localises the search results to bias for my country. Sometimes I want an outside opinion about what is going on. Google just doesn't seem to be as good as bing for that. It is better at finding local services like government sites for my country but worse at most other things now. I recommend people try bing now. A lot better than it was when it launched. I tried switching to other mail services but Gmail is the best with Google Doc integration and Google tasks but I'm leaving the search engine behind me.
A lot of the "progress" is just disruptive now, and change for the sake of change.
Last time I looked, Google was the competitor and created its products to compete. If its where it is today, it because their products were purchased by consumers that saw value in what they offer. Short sighted article.
But they can't even do that right.
Now when I goto the site and search, the arrows on my keyboard don't move the page, it's some stupid blue triangle.
And that's the most annoying to me because it's on by default and requires multiple clicks to disable it.
They are also doing things in new markets that really don't need to be done.
I liked Google when all they did, was basic searching. Beyond that, I'm starting to hate them now because they have strayed too far from their core.
And frankly if I didn't have a mousewheel to scroll through their pages, I would have stopped using them a long time ago.
Honestly, the 'best days are behind it' kinds of stories about any company should automatically set off the FUD alarms unless they are based on specific events which support the point like dropping market share, declining revenues, product recalls, mass layoffs, etc. Yesterday, there were newspaper columns about how people are allegedly turning away from Apple MacBooks because they allegedly don't render fonts as well as Windows 7. Shame on slashdot for providing a platform for such a story. Google may be dying or its prospects may never have been brighter but the truth of it will never be known to us from reading stories which germinate in fud-infested soil.
Google will always attract the "highly educated and impassioned workers" because they're willing to pay more. I just took a job with Google and they doubled my next best offer.
They're like a startup, in that they willfully infringe patents?
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/oracle-and-google-keep-wrangling-over.html
I guess they are willing to make mistakes.
Google is clearly on the right side of the java debacle. Java is licensed GPL2, which allows forks. The copyright license doesn't cover patents, true, but if you license your code to allow forks, and then sue for copyright infringement, I call estoppel.
It's a little flippant maybe, but really. Google is a company and whether they give good service to its customers is important, not it's health, imo. I think it's a little scary how much people seem to care about specific companies (Microsoft v. Apple, Sony v Xbox, etc.) when you are basically just a wallet to them, regardless of the quality of their products.
Once again, slashdot posts "Is (company with new product) doomed to failure?"
...Well, instead of giving us real news, say about what happened or what is likely to happen given current conditions, 'non news' makers go on the line and speculate with questions posing for real stories. I am tired of this.
Please get us some real news. A lot is happening in the tech sector. What's wrong with that?
Google thought they are smart not to repeat Microsoft's way of competing in other non-software market because the profit margins are lower. And when the war is won, there is not as much money to gain as a win on a software platform.
So Google went copying other "software" start-up's, especially those who seem weak at the time, e.g. Sun's java, or company with comparatively small hoard of cash. Like what Microsoft used to do with Microsoft Money, etc., Google figures it is easier to focus on squeezing more cash out of their monopoly on search, use the cash to fund their copying of others ideas and works, and to fund the buy-over if they got found out. Since Google gives away what they steal from others "free" to the public, they expect the full support from the public who, in turn, will influence the politicians.
What Google did not expect was that the old timers (Larry, Gates, and Jobs) to pool their cash resources to punish what they see as Google's willful crimes of stealing ideas--and make some money along the way. So instead of facing Sun and other bankrupt companies or small start-up's like Skyhook, Google got pawned by the three old legends. Google then try to appeal to the public to whom they give away their stolen ideas free. But users who do not pay have no allegiance, they are more interested in a good brawl. And for once, Microsoft's PR actually understands that.
I hate this stupid meme. Advertising firms provide specific services; they assist clients in defining their brand and develop campaigns across a range of media (TV, radio, print, web). Google does none of that. Google simply provides an advertising channel--and advertising channels have long been the primary revenue generator for pretty much every web-focused and traditional media company. Simply put, Google is no more an advertising company than NBC, Newsweek, Slashdot, or your favorite radio station.
linkg to fosspatents just shows you don't even have a vague fucking clue what you're reading. You're reading a pro-MS blog where they are about as anti-google as it gets? This article is much about zero.
Wow, and they wrote an article anti-google? WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?!?
jeezus troll, get the fuck off slashdot.
How many times do we have to debunk this shit? I should hope once is enough. Maybe twice? Estoppel plus anti-FUD good enough?
I don't see it dying but from the heavy fist of government--like the $500M suit for health-related search results in which no one was really hurt or compensated for their non-hurt.
The number of predictions made by these analysts, talking heads, policy wonks, think tank shills etc far exceed the actual number of companies. There is a constant stream of such predictions. At some point some one has to be right. Then the guy who won the lottery, i.e. the guy who predicted it exactly at the right moment, is going to beat his chest and make loud noises about how he got it right, when everyone else was wrong. The prize for winning that lottery is a life time supply of meal tickets. Essentially this guy will be invited to occupy one square in the talking heads matrix that is de regour (sp?) in the business news channels.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Those ideas have to get in front of users. Google Labs used to provide a way to do that, without the hurdle of a product launch. I worry about having it shut down.
As someone already mentioned this one trick pony is getting a bit near its end, yea they can keep adding stuff on to it, but google became google cause of a simple and fast search engine, that is not simple not fast and not really worth a fuck anymore as its loaded down with 10 trillion google mini apps, shovel fulls of shit java scripts, and the first 9 pages are fucking spam!
That's the only thing I worry about. As long as I have free space and the service is working, I do not even care about Google search.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
and why the hell each time he pop a bubble in his head we get a post on /.? /. himself or what?
Do he post his own article on
...it may be losing its appeal to the highly educated, impassioned workers that power its internal knowledge economy.
I never understood the appeal to highly educated people; I mean, 1. they are an advertisement company 2. the software they create is hardly revolutionary, it's all office software; I don't want to bash anyone but imho the paperclip is at the same level on the revolutionarity scale; well yeah, it's "on the internet", but that is something we are used to by now.
Why aren't these so called smart people not working in physics, or medicine? That would make more sense.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Considering I can probably patent the wheel at this point, and have no one interject with prior art, speaks volumes as to the how useless the 'idea monopolization' market is.
That email just shows you how much stock Google obviously puts into the patent system as well. If you honestly agree that Oracle is owed massive Billions for said 'infringement', you clearly have a warped sense of software value, much less justice.
What's a valid amount? $10 to Oracle per Android phone? How about $100 per phone. How much do Androids cost new again? Or, is it you just want to see Google take a hit like every other Tech. giant has throughout the industry. Either way, your bias is clearly showing.
Another "Ohh no any company who stands against MS and Apple is doomed!" article. Please drop this sensationalist crap.
Have Google acquired quite list of enemies during last two years? You bet. Do they struggle to fight them? Hardly. Yes, mobile patent war is going on with full power, but in fact they can't keep pressing on because soon courts will issue judgements and will invalidate patents. They work as long as Google feels threatened by them and therefore can be controlled. HTC doesn't back down, heck, they intend to fight Apple in court. Samsung too. And rest of the world where software patents simply doesn't work just uses Android and Linux on mobile and don't give a shit.
Of course Nortell and Novell patents buyouts are weapons to destroy Google. Of course Microsoft and Apple now in what legal shit they will land into if they will even publicly acknowledge this. Still, they want Google to feel breath on their necks.
So in nutshell - Google do what they have to do. They fight for their rights to earn descent money making proper business providing clients what they want. They don't and won't give up just because Microsoft and Apple feels threatened.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I'm no Google fan, but Oracle can burn to the goddamn ground.
Everyone I've talked to that works at Google has the same thing to say about how it's run: It's hugely bloated with middle management types. This is pretty much endemic to any company that has been around as long as Google has -- people need promotions, after all. But the end result of all these people in charge with 'opinions' on how things ought to be run is slowing down the company. Add this to some bizarre management decisions (Tying pay of the entire company to the success of +? Really?) and the fact that most of the original "make interesting things" people have gone on to found their own startups, and you're looking at any other tech company in Silicon Valley, save the fact that they apparently have more PhDs per square foot than just about anywhere on earth--doing NOTHING but working on ways to get you to look at ads. Who can blame them for doing random shit like the fiber project, self-driving cars, or what-have-you? They're getting desperate for innovation over there.
The thing about Google is that 90%+ of its entire revenue comes from search. This isn't true of Microsoft, or even Apple, or Oracle. They have multiple lines that generate revenue.
If Google loses 5% on search (not a lot) the blow to them is a LOT bigger than if MS loses on search, or Apple loses on iTunes. So as far as their best days being behind them, I'd say yes; but the same is true for MS and Apple, but in different respects.
Google needs to innovate outside of search, but everything they do keeps coming back around to search; even Google+. It's a datamining operation and it doesn't produce a line of revenue that's not susceptible to challenge, whether it's Bing/Facebook or something else. They need more sources of revenue, not ways to bolster their only line of revenue. But that's just my opinion.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Google has the tech already to become a force in VOIP phone usage.
They have the capacity on all the dark fiber they own
to use it with google voice.
It has the 1st or 2nd, depending on who you talk too, mobile phone
operating system on the market. Now they just have to leverage those
two and they are on their way to being the biggest player in those
segments. Of course they also are the number one search engine and
ad generator on the net. They have no where to go but up if they play
their cards right.
This started years ago when they broke search.
You can't search for exact text. Quote marks are ignored. No + operator. Case is ignored. Special characters are ignored.
This renders Google completely unusable at times.
Try searching for . It returns a million useless hits and 265 maybe hits.
The first result is an URL not a content match.
Then results contains FILE:HARD. That's not what I searched for. That's a failure state.
Then it starts giving results containing "file hard". That's not what I searched for. That's a failure state.
Anything that does not exactly contain the string is not going to be applicable to my problem. There's just no way to tell Google that.
They've completely thrown away usability in exchange for speed.
I find being offended by me offensive.
Bah It ate my error messages.
Try searching for <FILEHARD>. It returns a million useless hits and 265 maybe hits.
I find being offended by me offensive.
Google remains #1 in search and incredibly profitable at it. Nothing else they've tried makes much money. This worries their management, because if someone with a broader product line (like Microsoft) gets any real traction in search, Google could be toast. (Consider what Microsoft did to the video game industry.) Google has no other revenue stream.
That's not a bad place to be. Consider Oracle. They've been a database company for decades. Everything else they've tried to do, from video streaming to supercomputers, has been disappointing.
Personally, I think that Google's biggest problem is that they're not focusing enough on the search engine and search quality, which is their cash cow. They've made some big mistakes in search since last October. The press on Google has been very critical. That's new for Google. Until late 2010, they received very little bad press.
Most of their engineering talent is going into money-losing projects. What I hear is that the cool kids there want to work on mobile and social, not the big boring search engine. Page told his people that their bonus this year depends on how Google does in "social".
The trouble with focusing on "social" is that Facebook is about a fifth the size of Google and has probably peaked. Ads on "social" systems are an annoyance, unlike search ads, which are sometimes useful. The only way for a social network to increase revenue is to become more ad-heavy. Myspace tried that. We know how that came out.
ALL of their advertising? That's funny, I could have sworn I saw their ads on Youtube videos, and embedded in Android Apps, and of course, directly on people's sites, and in GMail and in a dozen other places. I'm not saying it's not the lion's share of their advertising, but it's certainly not all of their advertising.
content farms looking for "click-thru" revenue as p0wned google for quite some time now....
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
August is the slowest news month, when news outlets run anything and everything knowing no one will read it anyway.
That the "news" here is all second sourced and second-hand, not the latest or the fastest, and that there are better sites to keep up on the tech/g**k side of the news.
But then later in that same hour, I'll read something genuinely interesting that was missed by the main stream or read a take on a well tread story that I never considered, or read a reply that makes me laugh, choke or think...
To paraphrase Twain, rumors of Google's best days behind it are greatly exaggerated. (And usually from the same people who tried to sell us derivatives...)
Android is growing massively, they lead in search and they've finally cracked social networking. Microsoft on the other hand are losing billions in both the search and mobile markets every single year. They've been so focused on Google they didn't notice Apple sneaking by and their OS business is far closer than most people realize to fading into irrelevancy over the next decade or so.
People bring up software patents all the time but these only really apply in the US. They're screwed.
You'd better hope not, you're slave to them already, especially by your being chained to gmail.
and they will be cast as the Evil Empire as Microsoft was.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Haha...Florian Mueller, Shill Extraordinaire.
Google is to search engines what Frisbee is to flying discs. With such a recognizable brand name, I don't see them cowering under the competition, unless they shot themselves in the foot or something.
These are coordinated attacks on Google by those whom Google is out competing on a level playing field.
If marketing the best smartphone OS in the market to give them the #1 market share is evil then Microsoft is a pure saint, so soundly did the public reject Win Phone 7. If helping a company drive its 44% smartphone market share to less than 15% in one year is good competition then Microsoft is saintly indeed. I also noticed that it was that saintly company Microsoft that PR'd a lot about Google's "evil" in tracking wifi with geocordinates, but Microsoft published their own public website with the same information.
And, please tell me you'd rather have Larry Ellison rather than Larry Page influencing your web experience. IF that were the case you'd be paying a micro payment for each search, with extra added for narrowing to specifics, and there wouldn't be any other search game in town. One only has to look at how he's trying to abuse Java to realize what would happen if he ends up winning against Google, which I doubt he will unless he buys off the judge.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Eh, both "..." and + worked just fine last I checked.
VPS-like shared hosting, on under-crowded servers.
They just remotely removed Root from my Android phone. Which orphaned several of my applications... I've kept them of a reminder of the good old days when my phone belonged to ME!
I'm terrified of Google+ because I have two names in common use, not sure which one Google will accept and not willing to take the risk... Also when I try and think of reasons why they need people's real name, and consequently give each a single on line identity I can't think of many that conform with don't be evil.
Google has many brilliant minds, but when they turn evil they'll find that brilliant people find brilliant ways to screw up or goof off.
They can still get back on track, they need a small group of people to form an Internal Affairs Bureau (maybe make it a perk or rotating?). Would go a long way to make sure some VP wasn't sticking funny language in EULAs, evil terms of service, over harsh penalties for non-compliance etc.
I love Google, I'd still want to work there but they must realize that Geeks put them where they are, and if they want to be there in 20 years Geeks won't forget their mistakes. We have Google to remember for us. (or you know Baidu).
This started years ago when they broke search.
You can't search for exact text. Quote marks are ignored. No + operator. Case is ignored. Special characters are ignored.
This renders Google completely unusable at times.
Try searching for . It returns a million useless hits and 265 maybe hits.
The first result is an URL not a content match.
Then results contains FILE:HARD. That's not what I searched for. That's a failure state.
Then it starts giving results containing "file hard". That's not what I searched for. That's a failure state.
Anything that does not exactly contain the string is not going to be applicable to my problem. There's just no way to tell Google that.
They've completely thrown away usability in exchange for speed.
All these years, I've been deluded, then. Because I thought it was matching exact quotes first, then dredging up inexact matches when it ran out of reasonable exact matches. Fooled me!
I don't know about your search, but google does exact text searches if you put periods between the words. Write.it.like.this to get a single string, otherwise it will find pages that may rank higher if they have those 4 words somewhere in the page.
It's not for speed. It's for idiots. Google has been getting more and more lax in what they accept for spelling. You don't need to be accurate at all anymore.
They also go with synonyms a lot. I've noticed that you can no longer search for motorcycle queries without getting pedal-bike results as google treats "bike" as a synonym of "motorcycle".
And you can definitely not search for anything with symbols in it.
I do wish google had some "exact match" search, perhaps for coders which treated symbols more like alphanumeric characters, and was tighter with the synonym and spelling correction.
Yahoo, well, can't say I have an opinion of what it is like now, haven't used it since 2004. Does it still exist?
A few months ago, I did an analysis of the list of parents' email addresses from the school drama club. Yahoo was the most common provider with about a third of them. After that was the local DSL or cable ISP. Third place was people using work email addresses. GMail was fourth at about 15%. Then Hotmail/Live. Only about 1%, myself and one other person, were using a paid 3rd party service. For the record, I use usermail.com and am very happy with them, and seldom use my Gmail account.
What conclusions can be drawn from that? I would say Yahoo-email's first-mover advantage is much more durable than Friendster's or Myspace's was. Or perhaps Facebook's is. I would think that a survey of younger people would have fewer yahoosiers and more GMailers
Agreed.
Then you'll be happy to know that Google themselves discourages lockin.
I as well, but one of the amazing things about Google is that most of the time, when someone calls them on something or complains, Google listens. How many times has Apple or Microsoft changed policy because of user complaints? Google could be better, and if you talk them, they probably will be.
Nathan's blog
As the article states, Google faces intense competition in all the sectors that it is in and that it wishes to enter. Competition is good, and intense competition is even better. This competition will either keep Google at the top of its game, or it will fall behind. Either way, there will be innovation in the areas that Google moves into.
unless they shot themselves in the foot or something
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
AAPL figured it out, MSFT is coming around to the idea (very slowly as usual), and GOOG just isn't even trying. It is no longer sufficient to have one thing that keeps the lights on and a thousand things that everybody uses but don't make you any money. Admittedly, they have built up incredible brand recognition, and that little logo at the bottom of the smart phone that says "Google" is basically understood by most people to be "The Good Guys" fighting the "Evil Empire" of Microsoft and Apple. It won't help you if all you can do is give your products away.
There was a time when Google managed to do the impossible - balance the technological ability to do something profitable, with the ethics of implementation. They found a way to sell ads that were unobtrusive when the average where garish flash popups with sound. They made some really great software that, though it was ad supported, always was implemented in such a way that you never felt your privacy was in danger. Grepping a few words from an email for an ad is one thing, but saving every word I've ever written or received and selling the analysis of the above to the highest bidder? Not okay.
Lately, Google has been making choices lately that seem like the typical hyper-capitalist short-term-profit-at-any-cost sludge, especially relating to privacy. You end up having to give up more and more, letting more information be collected, stored, analyzed with less control over where it goes. The recent Google+ decision to mandate real meatspace names is the latest and more troubling. Despite the fact that people are gradually waking up to the "Fuck the stupid people for trusting me" privacy hole created by Zuckerberg in Facebook, Google didn't capitalize on differentiating Google+ by saying "Hey, you can use Google+ the way you want and with the privacy you're comfortable using. Hell, you can appear as different people to different other users or circles". No, they seemingly took the same road that having real names and, added to the multitude of info-tracking Google services, can log huge amounts of useful pertinent information to be available to those buying ad-space and mining data. Even in Android you have to capitulate to a lot of unnecessary data mining and recording to have access to relatively basic Google applications. Even Chrome, (and especially the feature gap between Chrome and Chromium) is unsettling - you're agreeing to far more tracking than its chief competitor, Firefox. Its disconcerting that so many geeks will take autotranslate and a little speed over the total control and web experience of Firefox. Even the crippled way "Ad blockers" work on Chrome illustrates the conflict of interest between Google, a company that sells advertising, and making a web browser where a user has control over what ads they wish to have loaded on their machine.
I just can't trust them any longer that "Don't be Evil" is winning out over the creeping greed that seems to have a controlling stranglehold on American business. Google may ride high on selling user data for the next few years, but as people increasingly awake to the fact they are no longer any different from the previous "Evil Empires", they'll be put to the wayside. This may take longer than "traditional" bad guys, especially with today's web populace, but it will happen. I'll be one of the first to leave if they don't get their act together - fewer and fewer entities on the web, especially private corps, have any respect for the concept of privacy and I'm willing to support those who do.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The goodness of a company is pretty much measured in growth, and well they have ready taken over most of the internet.
They simply cannot sustain the same growth rate as they are used to anymore because they are rapidly running out of places to grow into.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I remember hearing (though not sure it's not all just PR marketing) that the "Do No Evil" slogan came from the group of people that started Google having some pretty idealistic ideas of want they wanted to do. Profit was an ends to a means. The initial growth was to get to the point where they could implement some meaningful and enduring change. Well I think they have figured out the whole profit then now, the next phase to follow will be the most telling.
We shall see if they can stick to the "Do No Evil" slogan. In particular things I see that have the "potential" to be game changers for our collective culture, Google+ for the same reason that Facebook is, the music service once they fight the RIAA into submission in the courts, the out of copyright book service once they fight that fight in court.
If your trying to change things, particularly in the US, any business has to be prepared to basically get sued by everyone with a stake in the industry. They have the resources to have legs in these legal battles, and provided that the sentiment of the people, and political will can also be satisfied, than these and more can be accomplished.
So yes, I am hopeful for Google's future. I only hope that those that started it will keep the majority of shares, so that it won't just become another robotic slave to shareholders and profit, blindly gnashing for every scrap of money regardless of anything else. Maybe it is already there. However many of their projects seem at least on the surface to have some altruistic thought to it, however in many cases Google walks the line between those ideals, and the need to monetize some component for profit.
There is something wrong with Google's handling of that query
http://www.google.com/codesearch#search/&q=%3CFILEHARD%3E&type=cs -- Searching for the same thing in Google Code search brings up "Search query flow failed". Probably the first time I've seen that message from Google.
It does not seem to happen when searching for other queries which are in between greater-than less-than signs. For eg: < ERROR > works fine.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
They still have this attitude that since the stock market says that they are elite then they still are. Maybe in fact, they still represent a techies dream and that has been overflowed into society to think this way but I think their ego has gotten to them. They STILL decline offers to people with sub par GPAs or people that didnt go to harvard, stanford, cal berkley. If you graduated from the university of mississippi, have a 3.0 GPA, have 3 apps on the apple app store, 3 in the marketplace(imagine that), have 15 years experience in software development ranging from c++ to objective-C to lisp you won't get hired. For the record that isn't me but if you go read the google reviews on a site like glassdoor you will see the ways they really try to "weed" out people that aren't "qualified". If all you have is a GPA and you are a fresh grad then the GPA is all you have to go by + maybe a few "just for fun" stuff. other than that your GPA shouldn't mean squat. IMO.
"Privacy advocates accuse it of running roughshod over individual rights. As a result, it's becoming more cautious and risk-averse."
Maybe that other stuff is giving them some pause, but i don't seem them becoming any more hesitant because of privacy advocates. Last i heard Google was refusing to budge on the pseudonyms issue for G+ despite continual criticism from privacy advocates as well as numerous other parties.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
http://www.infoworld.com/print/168900 and you're welcome. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I don't know about your search, but google does exact text searches if you put periods between the words. Write.it.like.this to get a single string, otherwise it will find pages that may rank higher if they have those 4 words somewhere in the page.
Nope, just tried it with the phrase cannot.find.results. No results on the top page contain that phrase.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
And that may be the best thing to happen for innovation in a long while. I hope Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, et al continue to push Google and piss them off. Note: Aside from Oracle (their products are unusable) I use Microsoft, Apple, and Google stuff all the time. As a software developer I just hope the lawsuits pile on long and high. Becaue then maybe just maybe Google will stop lobbying to get zero percent tax on foreign profits with their cohorts and push for a transformative patent reform that would enable innovation to take place again.
So are Google's best days behind it? To some degree yes, but the same can be said of Microsoft, Apple, etc. Innovation is dead in favor of patent and sue. Google's second problem is a lack of direction. They seem like a company that lacks focus, getting involved in everything from self driving cars, wind power, to social networks. Leave that do everything be good at nothing nonsense to GE. So Google, fight tooth and nail on patent reform to ultimately win the battle of Android and force everyone to go back to competing on the merits of the product and not the size of your patent portfolio.
Google is not saintly, no corporation is. Why people feel the need to battle for a company or try to justify it defies logic, but I guess most people need a Jesus. And I personally think that Palm OS is the best mobile OS (I used an iPhone and currently have an Android Phone cause I liked the hardware and carrier better, the software between Android and iOS is similar enough to me to not be a major factor (although iTunes is a negative for iOS)) that has just the worst products and marketing associated with it. Amazon oh Amazon why did you not buy this and get into the game? Anyway, right now things are not pointing up for Google as high as it had in the past. So in that sense it has had better days, but to suggest that they will not go back up again would just be ignorant. Apple was just about dead in the water, so its best days were behind it and ahead of it. There is too much talent and too much ambition at Google for it to go into obscurity. I'll worry about Google when the talent, management, and drive leaves the company. That has not happened so I am on board for Google.
Google is clearly on the right side of the java debacle. Java is licensed GPL2, which allows forks. The copyright license doesn't cover patents, true, but if you license your code to allow forks, and then sue for copyright infringement, I call estoppel.
You can only fork if your fork is also GPL. Licensing under GPL doesn't mean you throw all your copyrights away. In particular, many open source projects make money by having a GPL version along with a corporate-license version (such as MySQL).
As you note, there's also the question of patents. Again, if your fork is GPL, then you've been given rights to the patents. If it isn't, then you don't have rights.
I don't know if its best days are behind it or not, but at least Sketchup may help push the bar on how easy to use a 3D CAD program should be.
A shame that it requires Sketchup Pro to export to DXF. For the price they're asking, I'd like to see direct Gcode output or something.
The bad old media wants to take Google out.
Google will modify what you put inside the ". For example it's impossible to search for special characters. There's hasn't been a way to do an exact search for at least 5 years.
+ will return pages that do not contain all the words. My post history has an example, albeit an old one.
I find being offended by me offensive.
At first glance it looks like someone isn't cleaning their input.
.05 seconds.
It's really annoying because searching for "disk full" returns millions of useless crap while "<DISKFULL>" almost guarantees that the results will be relevant.
I don't understand why Google throws away unique indentifying data like capitalization and special characters. Ok I do the answer is speed.
Some of us are willing to wait 5 seconds for good data so we don't have to wade through 16 million shit results that only took
Reducing the search space is not a how you optimize a system.
I find being offended by me offensive.
And you link to Florian's anti Google blog? How do you expect anyone to take you seriously.
I hate Microsoft ... but I'll go back to using Google when
1. They send "Google Instant" into a fiery, painful death in the Sun and draw and quarter the person that wrote that aneurism-inducing monstrousity, and
2. it stops saying "Showing results for System.IO. Discard Buffered Data() Click here for System.IO.DiscardBufferedData()." NO I did NOT mean your stupid "most of the population" BS.
Until then, I'll bite the bullet and use Bing. Sure it's crappy, but at this point, it's a little less crappy than Google.
They do email and business apps quite well
I know lots of people here like to parrot the nonsense that profit profit profit now now now is legally and ethically the sole objective of publicly traded corporations, but that's simply hogwash.
You are discussing fiduciary duty. A fiduciary duty has nothing inherently to do with making a "profit now". Yes company management in publicly traded firms have a legal obligation to look out for the financial interest of the investors of the company. Their duty however may mean that they are obligated to take a long term perspective or a short term one based on the circumstances. A fiduciary duty is a necessarily vague concept and time to a return on investment is at most a second order consideration.
Google does have an exact-match search. Put the word in quotes.
For example, try searching for:
bike components
Notice that the hits find the string 'cycling' and 'bicycle' as synonyms for 'bike'
Now try putting double quotes around 'bike':
"bike" components
Notice that this disabled synonym matching for 'bike'. Synonyms are still found for 'components'.
I don't use Google for anything other than its search engine.
- Google Chrome to me is overhyped, the minimal GUI is irritating and it has a poor amount of add-ons.
- Gmail is nice but I've subscribed to countless sites (and still do) with my @msn and it gets the job done (it receives e-mail, big surprise there), the only time I use Gmail is at work, because the educational institution I work at uses it.
- Google Docs are of no use to me.
- Blogger I do like.
To me "best days" is irrelevant, in my case the usefulness is still there and will be there. It doesn't have to impress anyone or be ahead of anyone else.
All glory to Arstotzka!
Google seems to have fixed the error message on their code search
Also +"<FILEHARD>" seems to do better than simple quotes - The "+" forces google to look for single word Filehard.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
Microsoft in its heyday had the most skilled engineers in software development. People would take a pay-cut to work for Microsoft, knowing they'd be potential "quarter millionaires" with vesting options if they worked their butts off and provided winning projects, and that they'd also build their skills massively by doing very cool cutting edge work.
What hurt Microsoft was first, the stock price languishing as growth ended, and then Sarbanes-Oxley requiring full expensing of stock options. Thus the transition to an H1-B body shop, off-shoring, etc. Microsoft is now an Indian-Chinese body shop with low pay, low expectations, and no real ability to attract anything other than a few highly paid superstars and low-skilled Indian/Chinese H1-B folks, along with of course off-shoring.
Google still gets the best of the programming best. Who tend to be relatively young, willing to work insane hours, think in new ways to solve problems, and have general skill levels across the board much higher than other companies.
Success for a company is almost always dependent on (if they are not a commodity provider like say a Copper mining corporation) the general skill and motivation of their people. For Google that is quite high. Microsoft's best certainly equals Google's best, but their regular employees are unmotivated, semi-serf cube dwellers focused on building up nest-eggs and connections for real work done back in India or China. A goodly portion of Microsoft coding is done in India or China itself, chasing cheap labor.
I'd bet Google still has a way to grow, and thus attract the best people wanting to share that growth in revenue, rather than adopt a "cheapest is best" approach to labor that Microsoft has done.
Really? How about some new tricks?
"Journalism 101: How to blog."
Take something popular and insert it's name in this headline "Is YOUR_CHOICE_HERE dead?"
Write story to support your made up position. Enjoy the controversy and readership bump.
p.s. Google isn't dead, nor is it likely to die. They've been too big to fail for years. See IBM for examples.
In ten years when every car is self driving, and generates major royalties for Google, kids reading this will be wondering why you missed all the "metaphorical road signs".
Tried in bing, yahoo. Got similar results. Not sure how "As bad as competitors for obscure use case" means they are losing their edge.
Well, this is not true, is it? Do some more test cases and I believe one will find that quotation marks and the "+" operator (and "-") are fully functional.
Misunderstanding their interface does not make them bad.
How much is this recent surge in Google-FUD costing the Apple-Microsoft Coalition?
"We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be." - Joss Whedon via Angel
I know some of the goodies that are in the works, and I can't say much, but consider another 10 years of stocks going up....!