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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.
When it stops being fun, it's all downhill.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
OK, that's it. Sonic for lunch.
it's bigger than Ford, GM, Starbucks, FedEx, United Airlines, and Viacom combined.
So, I guess it depends on what one counts as "best days".
It's gone from being the cool new kid on the block to a technology behemoth with the corresponding beaurocracy and an eye on its main revenue stream.
Just like microsoft, its meteoric rise is certainly over.
However, it isn't going anywhere and will continue to grow for a while yet. It will certainly make the founders a good deal richer. So, it depends on what you consider to be the best days.
Do you want the yound small company that does only cool stuff, or do you want the megacorp which is phenomenonally rich and does some cool stuff?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Individually there might not be a lot of spending power, but there are an awful lot of Chinese people.. so anyone who can get into that market early is going to do pretty well out of even moderate rises in their average spending power. Nobody really knows how quickly their economy will grow, or how quickly the US's will fade.. a whole lot can happen in 13 years.
which is totally what she said
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.
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.
Big market != Good business. Trading profits, IP, and making compromises on your business for access to a big market are not necessarily good business moves.
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.
content farms looking for "click-thru" revenue as p0wned google for quite some time now....
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Interestingly, Apple before the Second Coming of Jobs had one of the same problems Google does today: too many products, forcing them to spread their resources too thin to support them all. Apple in the 1990s had an incredible profusion of different flavors of Mac; one of Jobs' first big decisions was simplifying it down to four key product lines and throwing the rest out. (Here's video of Jobs himself explaining the situation at the 1998 Macworld keynote.) It angered a lot of people at the time, but that decision was a big part of what started Apple's turnaround.
Read my blog.
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.
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!
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.
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