Google's Crazy Lack of Focus: Is It Really Serious About Enterprise?

curtwoodward writes "Driverless cars. Balloon-based wireless networks. Face-mounted computers. Gigabit broadband networks. In recent months, Google has been unveiling a series of transformative side projects that paint a picture of the search pioneer expanding far beyond an online advertising company. At the same time, Google has been trying to convince enterprise software buyers that it's finally, really, truly serious about competing with Microsoft for their business. Which version of Google's future should you believe?"

Comments

All of them.

[CRC'99]

There is no real reason why Google can't do all of these things. Their core market is information. Gathering information. Processing information. Sorting and utilising information.

Once you're good at this, it isn't hard to expand into various uses for that information.

Re:All of them.

[Cenan]

There is no real reason why Google can't do all of these things

Except closing down projects that don't meet arbitrary internal goals without warning. Nobody is going to trust Google with enterprisey stuff, since they can't seem to hold focus long enough for people to actually build an infrastructure around their offerings. When the next new thing comes along, guess which balloon side project gets canned, for no reason, with no warning, leaving countless gimps clamoring for an alternative that is nowhere to be found.

They might be all about processing information, but they can't seem to actually monetize this beyond shoving ads in their users faces.

Re:All of them.

[Chrisq]

Absolutely. There are historical precedents. Bell labs did things as diverse as writing Unix, inventing the transistor, and the construction of DNA machines.

Re:All of them.

[Anonymous Coward]

They have a pretty good migration shedule, sure, they "close" stuff without warning, but they give you plenty of time to get your data out. And most things that they close are not as popular as some of the users believe they are.

Since there is no alternative to be found, you also suggest that their producs are often either way better than the competition or really in niche markets. You can't really force them to keep running losing products, certainly not if they do not contribute to their core information gathering strategy. Youtube ran losses for a while, but it worked well with what they had.

Also, while ads certainly are their biggest feature, they have quite a few other products that either manage to substantially offset their costs or give profits.
Further on, it is also possible that contrary to what the title suggests, google really is focussed and all their products have something to do with the information gathering and processing that seems to be their core. And that does seem true. The fiber they roll out is because they want the internet to become faster, because nearly all of their business is on the internet, for android they want a better online mobile experience and have an ad market there. Chrome tries to improve the browser world to ensure they can get the informationt they need. Balloon wireless service just the same. Google knows that once the third world gets a bit of money, they will be looking to buy stuff like a washing machine, which they want to be the one showing the ad for. I am not sure I can fit the driveless car anywhere in the picture, but probably they don't want you to go offline during commute, they want you to be able to see their ads, especially since you will be near stores that do the advertising.

Re:All of them.

[jkflying]

As far as I'm aware, they haven't done that with any enterprise stuff. And as for monetizing things besides using ads, AppEngine much? CloudSQL? Cell-tower Geo-location services?

Google has no problem with paid apps when it is dealing with enterprise customers. It just seems that they'd rather not deal with extracting payments from personal consumers, letting their advertising customers do that for them.

Re:All of them.

[perryizgr8]

except they closed reader :(

Re:All of them.

[DerekLyons]

There is no real reason why Google can't do all of these things.

From the enterprise users POV, the problem isn't necessarily Google's ability to do these things. (Though that is a huge question mark.) It's trusting Google to do these things. Google's history is littered with half ass projects of one kind or another... Some cancelled half complete, other left lingering in limbo and half complete for years. Of the products that are more-or-less complete and functional, the vast majority of them languish for months between bizarre and incomprehensible "upgrades".
 
This history does not lead to confidence in the customer that they can build a business around Google's offerings.

Re:All of them.

[Sollord]

Well save for the fact one can still buy the Google Search Appliance the only one they totaly stopped making was the limited and pointless MIni version. There was a small time frame it was unavailable as they got ready to launch the GSA7

Re:All of them.

[Errtu76]

Indeed. Take for example my startpage iGoogle, which is now going to be abandoned. And they have the nerve to shut it down with only 1.5 years prior warning. Bastards.

Re:All of them.

[su5so10]

Google Appliance is still an active project. They are even hiring.

Re:All of them.

[flyneye]

Flip a coin, shut down a program and call the accountants to call it a loss on taxes. What's the problem here? Looks ordinary to me.
Next up, the Google inflatable mate w/ bucking mechanism and heater, it makes it's own pr0n movies and uploads them to Redtube while you pump away.
It collects customer data to recommend lube, toys or Viagra. It also has a government backdoor...

Re:All of them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats why I had "close" between brackets. The parent post said "without warning" and I decided to stick with it. Their announcements of projects ending does come unexpected sometimes, but their actual closing date is very reasonable, with plenty of time to migrate.

Re:All of them.

[Ash Vince]

Except closing down projects that don't meet arbitrary internal goals without warning.

Actually having a realistic number of users is not an arbitrary goal is it? They mostly seem to close down crap projects that nobody cared about.

Re:All of them.

[jythie]

I don't know, 'enterprisey' companies pull the same stunts often enough.

Re:All of them.

[Ash Vince]

There is no real reason why Google can't do all of these things.

From the enterprise users POV, the problem isn't necessarily Google's ability to do these things. (Though that is a huge question mark.) It's trusting Google to do these things. Google's history is littered with half ass projects of one kind or another... Some cancelled half complete, other left lingering in limbo and half complete for years. Of the products that are more-or-less complete and functional, the vast majority of them languish for months between bizarre and incomprehensible "upgrades".

This history does not lead to confidence in the customer that they can build a business around Google's offerings.

Can you name one example of them doing this too an app thats was aimed at enterprise users? And please don't say Google Docs because in that case they just merged the same functionality (or very close to it) into Google Drive.

Re:All of them.

[kthreadd]

Since Google is so open why don't you just download the source code for Reader and run your own instance?

Google is not open.

Re:All of them.

[malkavian]

We don't actually depend on them though. In some places, they're creating new markets, which if they prove viable, will then have competition from other areas. In some places, they're simply competing against other companies for space in an existing market.
Now, if Google became mandated by the world's governmental organisation and granted eternal monopoly, I'd have a problem with it, but so far, I don't find much that they do (apart from the depth of the data gather) even remotely related to a dystopic world. Unless you include 'Brave New World', and that's not your usual dystopia.

Re:All of them.

[FooAtWFU]

What's worse than ending any particular product is mangling the Internet, like they did with the shutdown of Google Reader and with newsgroups.

Re:All of them.

[MrMickS]

As a frequent Google products user (mail, phone, tablet, maps...) I wonder how good is for us to depend on a single company for every service required in an urban life style: Mobile devices, computers, cars, network connections... Whats next, Google schools? All of these reminds me of scifi distopic societies.

Given what you use I wouldn't worry, you've already given in and been absorbed into the hive mind.

Seriously. If this was anyone but Google /. would be up in arms about the breadth of control and influence they have over people's lives. Sadly there is a blindness where Google is concerned on here as on many other technical sites. Google have too much influence now. Its about time people stopped and thought about it.

Re:All of them.

[fatrat]

Google Secure Data Connector. Totally an enterprise focused product. Never really supported (getting it to work involved reading the source code), now announced to be closed with no replacement (though with a suitably long 18 month lead time).

Re:All of them.

[mcvos]

Their core market is advertising. They need information to know what kind of advertisements are most relevant for you.

Basically they want two things:
* More information on what people are looking for or interested in,
* More people using internet, looking for stuff they're interested in.

So their investment in internet infrastructure (fiber, balloons) is more making more people use the internet more. Android same thing. Everything else is for figuring out what you're interested in so they can show you advertisements you're likely to click on.

Re:All of them.

[gtbritishskull]

Driverless Car - Surfing the internet and looking at Google Ads while *not* driving.

Re:All of them.

[xelah]

It does come with problems, though. Consider what happens if Google's car research pushes out publicly funded (and published) research and ties the field up in IP claims and secrecy. Aside from hindering research, this builds a potential future monopoly for something very important - not to mention the risks of Google tracking the journeys made and stuffing cars full of advertising.

Re:All of them.

[Mashdar]

I still miss GOOG-411 :( And AFAIK that just disappeared one day.

Re:All of them.

[Anonymous Coward]

They have a pretty good migration schedule

Yeah - for your PERSONAL stuff that takes you 20 minutes to migrate or backup.

You've clearly never managed an enterprise software product. The entire point of enterprise software is that it affords deep integration into your workflows and internal processes and systems throughout the company.

"We're closing this down in 6 months" is barely enough time to plan a migration, much less actually PERFORM the migration. And that's the point: if Google wants BUSINESSES to trust that Google isn't going to pull the rug out from under them, then Google needs to start taking migrations and end-of-life's seriously.

It's fine if they want to be a consumer advertising company, and don't want the enterprise business. But the entire article is based on the premise that Google wants this "Enterprise" business.

they have quite a few other products that either manage to substantially offset their costs or give profits.

No, they really don't. 95+% of their revenues are generated by advertising. They make virtually NO money from any source that is not advertising. Go look at their financial statements.

Re:All of them.

[serviscope_minor]

And most things that they close are not as popular as some of the users believe they are.

That doesn't matter. Apart from the most major services, things often get shut down. That means that new google services are not trustworthy, and you have to expect them to go. If that's the case, why bother wasting time on using their infrastructure if you're moderately sure you'll have to end up rebuilding it yourself anyway.

You can't really force them to keep running losing products,

No one is forcing google to do anything, but they also cannot force people to use their products. If they have the reputation for new things not being a trustworthy provider (they do have that reputation) then they will not garner new users and will not get the associated revenue.

They also seme to love upgrades which improve shinyness but do little else (gmail, google docs^Wdrive, google maps, etc). It's their service and they're giving it away for free, but I need a very compelling case to buy any of the professional google services because of my experience of their free services.

Re:All of them.

[Archangel Michael]

It collects customer DNA to inform the NSA

FTFY - ewwww

Re:All of them.

[TyFoN]

Google shut down USENET? :)

Or do you mean their interface to it?
I can still read my groups in gnus..

Re:All of them.

[jellomizer]

All fine and good if your business runs nimble enough to handle this. But Enterprise class is software for the slow lumbering business where it would take Months or years for the people who needs to know to migrate off the system to actually know about it. Then they will need to setup a migration team and find an alternate products and all a bunch of other nonsense.

Enterprise software usually Sucks Majorly. But it sucks consistently, and that is why they buy it.

Re:All of them.

[Bing Tsher E]

Well, we can always hope that they'll drown those big meeting rooms full of 'middle management' enterprise types in the churn of their product cycles.

I mean, the days of 'six months of integration meetings before a final review and then a 12 month adoption process' could be over. Schwoop. All those suits sucked down the drain. All that planning, the meetings to define the 'scope' of the project. All the fucking Gantt charts. Drowned in the churning reality of change in the modern world.

What a tragedy.

Re:All of them.

[Bing Tsher E]

but they also cannot force people to use their products.

Correct. They can't force the suits to change, the guys with a microwave and a mini-fridge in their office that has a real door. Certainly not without a long extensive review process.

They're pretty good at selling their ideas to the crew members. Fuck the Enterprise. We've got shuttle-craft.

Re:All of them.

[prelelat]

That's a more than fair assessment of the situation though the subject of the article seems to suggest that this isn't the core problem with Enterprise adoption but that the fact they are over stretching into some strange projects. Frankly I don't think this is any different than Microsoft expanding into the video game, phone, tablet, and all the other things that they do. It's just that Google is cooler, newer fresher so they get a big chunk of media attention over it.

My main concern with Google's products in the corp world is, is that it's all cloud based. Google's bread and butter is analyzing all the data they collect to market to you better. It's not something I want. I don't want Google looking at stuff and I don't want a government gag order coming down to collect data and not knowing about it. If we keep it in house and end up with a legal order to submit data that's one thing but if Google gets it with a gag order that's a whole other ball game.

Re:All of them.

[jedidiah]

The thing about "Enterprise" is that it likely involves actual contracts rather than than click through EULAs.

Oracle managed to sue HP over this very thing because the issue of support was addressed in a contract. Oracle was able to go to court and make HP live up to it's end of the bargain.

If you are whining about how Google can quickly discontinue some consumer product, you either have no clue how "Enterprise" operates or you are being intentionally forgetful.

Re:All of them.

[Bing Tsher E]

They took over the biggest and deepest archive repository. Then obfuscated the interface.

Re:All of them.

[Richy_T]

Not that I know of. They did try and shoehorn their own google groups in alongside it though.

Re:All of them.

[phantomfive]

Except closing down projects that don't meet arbitrary internal goals without warning

It's not always about shutting stuff down, you never know when you're going to wake up and gmail or whatever has a completely changed UI or something, for no apparent reason. You get to work and all your users are complaining.

All enterprise companies have a huge 'customer investigation' arm, that goes out and talks with customers, finds out what their corporate customers want. That is the biggest difference between a B2B company and a consumer facing company. A B2B company won't make a randomly redesigned UI (like the new iPhone) just because they think it's prettier. Every change is answering the question, "how can this help our customers make more money?" Google definitely doesn't get that.

Re:All of them.

[jedidiah]

> Totally an enterprise focused product. Never really supported

Re:All of them.

[TheLink]

I wonder how many Google "ads" the NSA and friends buy... ;)

Re:All of them.

[amRadioHed]

There are reasons why people trust their data with Google more than other companies. The fact that they have projects like dataliberation.org makes me less concerned about the possibility of being locked in to any of their products. People bitch about Google shutting down Reader, but Google makes it easy to export your subscriptions so you can use them in a new product. Also, Google does collect a lot of our data, but they are transparent about it and are pretty good about allowing people to opt out.

Re:All of them.

[steelfood]

It's their service and they're giving it away for free

Except, they're taking this exact same mentality to the enterprise world too. Only, the enterprise market pays for the services; it's not free. And in the enterprise, there's one and only one thing that matters: stability.

This mentality does not fly for enterprises. Making significant changes every few months, terminating all support for deprecated services under 2 years (by support, I mean the actual service itself), releasing their "beta" products to a production environment and hoping nobody'd notice the bugs.

Just remember that IBM is still supporting their mainframes from the 1970's (albeit for a price). Note that Microsoft Office 2012 will run VBA code from Office 97. That's enterprise support. Support for XP will last 13(!) years, and enterprises will still use it for another 10. Enterprises manage change in 10-20 year timeframes, not the .5-2 that Google likes and insists everyone else follow.

Google's the antithesis of what enterprises want and need. If they didn't practically have a monopoly in certain areas, if they weren't the most reliable vendor by far for certain services, nobody'd touch them with a 10ft pole.

Re:All of them.

[amRadioHed]

How can you blame them for ending support for something you say was never really supported to begin with? The product may have been useful to enterprises, but without at least the option of a support agreement in writing you can not consider it enterprise software.

Re:All of them.

[ranton]

I mean, the days of 'six months of integration meetings before a final review and then a 12 month adoption process' could be over. Schwoop. All those suits sucked down the drain. All that planning, the meetings to define the 'scope' of the project. All the fucking Gantt charts. Drowned in the churning reality of change in the modern world.

You can't possibly have ever been in a position of importance while working on software systems for an enterprise sized company. It can easily take six months just to acquire funding for a migration project, let alone get anything done. Working on enterprise projects is not like working at a SMB. You have dozens of divisions in dozens of subsidiaries using dozens of different software products that all have loose integrations. You don't just grab ten developers, think up a few requirements, and deliver your first sprint the next week. Even small project budgets are still measured in millions of dollars.

Well, we can always hope that they'll drown those big meeting rooms full of 'middle management' enterprise types in the churn of their product cycles.

While there are plenty of worthless managers out there, they are far more rare than useless software developers. Even if their main skill in the office politics that helped them move up the ladder, the ability to get vital projects funded is just as important and difficult as being able to properly implement those projects. Getting companies to cough up tens of millions of dollars on projects they initially feel are sunk costs is no easy task.

When I am being offered a job I always try to get a feel for the company's middle management. The upper management comes and goes as blame and praise is constantly shifted, but the middle management that I will work with are usually more constant. I will probably be in a senior enough position that I can change many poor software engineering processes, but I will likely have little impact on how effective the company's managers are.

Re:All of them.

[Rinikusu]

Driverless cars:

DAN THE MAN
Car, I'm hungry, what's around here?

CAR
Based on your browsing history, there is an all-you-can-eat chicken wings special at Top Girls Cabaret, 0.5 miles away. Shall I proceed to this destination?

DAN THE MAN'S WIFE
--Chicken Wings, eh?

DAN THE MAN'S 5 YO DAUGHTER
Daddy, what's a "cabaret?"

Re:All of them.

[Cenan]

Without warning was probably a poor choice of words, true. They give warning that is actionable for individual users, not to an enterprise who have very different stability demands, and very, very different reaction times.

Re:All of them.

[Daetrin]

they have quite a few other products that either manage to substantially offset their costs or give profits.

No, they really don't. 95+% of their revenues are generated by advertising. They make virtually NO money from any source that is not advertising. Go look at their financial statements.

I agree with most of the rest of the stuff you said, however there's absolutely no discrepancy between "they have many products that are close to breaking even or even make a profit" and "95% of their revenue is from a single product."

Given exactly how much they make from ads it's not surprising that their other areas may not seem competitive. However that does not mean a priori that there is no reason to continue those ventures. Sure, a profit of $100 million from [insert product here] might not seem like a lot compared to the dozens of billions they get from advertising, but $100 million of profit is $100 million of profit. And then of course there's things like Android, where they don't see a lot of direct profit but it is an important part of the ecosystem.

Re:All of them.

[swillden]

I am not sure I can fit the driveless car anywhere in the picture, but probably they don't want you to go offline during commute, they want you to be able to see their ads, especially since you will be near stores that do the advertising.

Actually, I think the driverless cars are just really cool, world-changing tech that Sergey really wanted to work on. Google is a company of geeks, and while fitting everything into an overarching business strategy is a good idea, sometimes stuff is done just because it's awesome and no one else is doing it.

Re:All of them.

[Cenan]

You really do not have a clue how big enterprises operate do you?

Well, we can always hope that they'll drown those big meeting rooms full of 'middle management' enterprise types in the churn of their product cycles.

Nobody in middle management is getting the boot because Google pulled the rug out from under a million dollar venture, but the poor sod of an engineer that works below that guy will absolutely get fucked over, even if it was never his decision. Balls of shit roll downhill, always - if you made it to middle management in an enterprise, you're 1/2 politician already.

Re:All of them.

[PopeRatzo]

While there are plenty of worthless managers out there, they are far more rare than useless software developers.

Maybe in absolute numbers, but certainly not as a percentage.

Re:All of them.

[ranton]

Maybe in absolute numbers, but certainly not as a percentage.

Maybe I have just done a better job selecting my job offers, but outside of SMBs (I should have specified that) I find most middle managers to be very competent compared to the average developer working for them. That is probably because most of the talented developers eventually go into consulting or become middle managers themselves.

Re:All of them.

[mccrew]

There is no real reason why Google can't do all of these things.

Well actually there is one: as a public company, they are expected to maximize profits. Even with the myriad of interesting projects and products, 99% of Google's revenue and profit comes from search-based advertisements. At the end of the day, that's where they'll circle the wagons. Everything else is, well, everything else.

Re:All of them.

[hackula]

Stability is huge, but I would also add configurability. I tend to think MS has a big leg up there as well. At the same time, the web allows you to mash loads of services together (with a development team, which these businesses generally have), which is something enterprise desktop users have wanted since forever. Plugging into something like Salesforce tends to be far cheaper than plugging into something like SalesLogic (desktop/server CRM).

Re:All of them.

[flyneye]

It'll tell your mom you've been boinking a blow up dolly!
There really needs to be a Big Bang Theory with a blow up doll. There just does.

Re:All of them.

[Curtman]

They have a pretty good migration shedule, sure, they "close" stuff without warning, but they give you plenty of time to get your data out

They give you the ability to get your data out, that's what makes them not evil AFAIC. Example:
Google Buzz, The Social Network No One Cared About, Is Finally Going Offline

Not too many people cared to use it, and in October 2011 Google announced that itâ(TM)d eventually discontinue the service. Finally and at long last, Googleâ(TM)s determined that the time has arrived. Doors are closing on Buzz forever, and youâ(TM)ll receive a backup data file of all your posts saved to your Google Drive on or after July 17, 2013. Any active Buzz users out there better take note â" your service is only guaranteed through July 17. For everyone else, you can go about continuing to live your lives.

18 months is fair notice, if it's something you care about you've got time to figure a solution.

Re:All of them.

[swillden]

"We're closing this down in 6 months" is barely enough time to plan a migration, much less actually PERFORM the migration. And that's the point: if Google wants BUSINESSES to trust that Google isn't going to pull the rug out from under them, then Google needs to start taking migrations and end-of-life's seriously.

What paid products has Google shut down?

Re:All of them.

[tlambert]

They have a pretty good migration schedule

Yeah - for your PERSONAL stuff that takes you 20 minutes to migrate or backup.

You've clearly never managed an enterprise software product. The entire point of enterprise software is that it affords deep integration into your workflows and internal processes and systems throughout the company.

I'd be more impressed with a number of products if they permitted you to continue running them on their cloud services, after they have ben generally end of lifed. I doubt that anyone would be continuing to run Google Reader or similar products which were nothing but money-losing propositions, but there are other products that have been EOL'ed that I could imagine an enterprise wanting to keep something around for an extra 6-8 months to actually get their business processes migrated some place else.

If you're going to kill something like this, something on which a business has become dependent for day to day operations, and you are in the business of selling cloud services, you might as well open source the thing, since it's already tied to your back end cloud services anyway, and the worst thing that's going to happen, since those services are based on a proprietary platform, is the company gives you more money. Absolutely worst case, you don't open source it, but you time limit the contract so no one takes your sources and ports them over to OpenStack.

they have quite a few other products that either manage to substantially offset their costs or give profits.

No, they really don't. 95+% of their revenues are generated by advertising. They make virtually NO money from any source that is not advertising. Go look at their financial statements.

I think this is something that's frequently lost on people, Google has one main product, and they have a couple of vehicles that they use to deliver that product: primarily search, and secondarily AdWords/AdSense, with gmail at a distant third place. It's not even possible to argue Android, since nearly all productization of Android is done by code freezing the source tree, and the partners, not Google, productizing it to bring it to market. This might change with the purchase of Motorola Mobility, but I wouldn't count on it.

Re:All of them.

[david_thornley]

While there are plenty of worthless managers out there, they are far more rare than useless software developers.

First, although it's hard to measure how useful a developer is, it's even harder to measure how useful the manager is. A manager who plays the politics game well will be perceived as good, and will be able to deflect blame downward. That's bad management, but may be indistinguishable from good management with bad subordinates.

Second, how good a developer is depends heavily on management. There's lots of things managers can do to influence productivity, both positively and negatively. A good manager will have developers that perform better than a bad manager (who can make useless developers out of competent ones).

Third, a good manager will tend to retain good developers, while a bad one will tend to bleed them and wind up with people who have difficulty holding down a job in the real world. Remember that blame deflection above? A good developer, with pride in his or her work, will resent that, and won't stand for it long.

For what my observations are worth, I generally see useless developers working in dysfunctional departments, not in places that manage them well. If I saw a group of worthless developers, I'd conclude that the management was almost certainly bad.

Re:All of them.

[Daetrin]

You are again (all ACs are the same, right?) arguing a false dichotomy and pairing it with just plain wrongness. Let's take this a step at a time.

- "Asserting that Google has "many products that are close to breaking even or even make a profit" would suggest that they have at least a couple other significant contributors to their bottom line."

If by "significant" you mean "significant compared to their advertising revenue" then i didn't say that, and the one does not imply the other. If by "significant" you just mean "a lot of money by most people's standards" then yes, i stand behind that and will show why below.

- "When 95% of your revenues (not PROFITS) are from advertising, that leaves a pretty small slice of the pie for those "many" other profitable (or near-profitable) products and services."

That's true, but a pretty small slice of the pie is still a slice of the pie. And if the original pie is HUGE then even a very small slice of it could be significant.

Also, why do you stress that it's revenues rather than profits? That actually hurts your case. I know it isn't so, but imagine if 95% of their revenue was from advertising, but the costs of that advertising actually exceeded the revenue, and thus 100% of their profits were from non-advertising? If they couldn't see any way to improve those margins then it would make absolute sense to shut down all their advertising even though it meant losing 95% of their revenue. In a less extreme case, if 95% of their revenue is from ads but only 90% of their profit was from ads, expanding into other areas would make a lot of sense. In reality i suspect that their profits are at _least_ 95% from ads, but if you don't happen to know the exact numbers it only makes your position weaker to stress the revenue part.

- "Perhaps you'd like to name just 3 major sources of revenue - of the MANY you claim exist - for Google that aren't some form of selling ads?"

I don't have Google's financials memorized, and i'm not sure why i have to prove it, especially since i didn't make the original claim. Someone said they had a lot of products/areas that were close to or even slightly over breaking even. You tried to disprove that by saying "They make virtually NO money from any source that is not advertising." A quick check shows Google earned about 14 billion last quarter. 5% of that is $700 million. For anyone not in Google's league that would be a very large chunk of change. Though i don't happen to know exactly which divisions that revenue is split between, it helps support (though does not prove) the original commenter's claim that there are other divisions making money.
- "I know this is a hard truth to swallow, but Google is an advertising company [...]"

Did i ever say otherwise? Just because their primary business is advertising doesn't mean they can't expand into other areas. And as long as those other areas are pulling in close to $3 billion a year there's no reason for them to shut down any of those areas that are currently making a profit or look like they will be soon.

Uhhhh

[Anonymous Coward]

As a user of Google apps for a Small NON-enterprise company... Google's solutions where a joke until a few years ago... now I wish they had this solution to start with! I LOVE IT!

For a company that knows nearly everything?

[mitcheli]

World domineering overlord.

Re:For a company that knows nearly everything?

[Sarten-X]

Why the hell is this not +5?

With some heavily rose-tinted glasses, Google's business plan is blatently obvious. It intends to be Umbrella Corporation. Every facet of our lives will be working with or for Google. We wake up to our Android phone's alarm clock, read the Google-supplied news feed, ride our Google-powered autonomous car to work from our Google-connected rural home, use Google Apps to do our jobs, then go out in the evenings to a nice park (whose health is monitored and managed by Google) to relax and communicate with our friends via Google's social networks. For traditional entertainment, Google's happy to provide information, buy tickets, or give directions. At the end of the day, our Google cars pick us up and take us home.

Google's motto is "Don't be evil". This doesn't necessarily apply to every day-to-day action, but rather to the overall behavior of the world-dominating mega-corporation - Umbrella was evil. Google doesn't want to be. They aren't out to build superweapons or exterminate the world's pests. They aren't really out to make money (though that is still a secondary goal). Google just aims to be helpful to every bit of daily life, and that gets them a small slice of every transaction.

This is the long-awaited future we've been reading about in sci-fi. The all-encompassing network knows what we want, and provides. The network can invade everyone's privacy, but by and large it doesn't really care about any individual. It can monitor its own health, and understand the sentiment of its users. All that this nearly-sentient network cares about is to maximize certain metrics - possibly even "happiness" and "personal freedom". As the network takes over people's lives, the need for governments (and government-supported fighting) declines, and after a few centuries of working out personal disputes, general peace will finally reign... with a familiar four-color logo.

I exaggerate Google's scope for entertainment, but not by much. Once upon a time, Microsoft's plan was "a computer on every desk and in every home", and Google's just extending that to match modern capabilities. We can have a computer on every pedestrian, in every car, and at the head of every industry. Microsoft tried to push itself into markets, and generally succeeded, but never seems to be the best in anything. Google, on the other hand, tries to make something that's the best, and hopes it will take up a market eventually. They're playing the very long game.

That's why Google kills off so many projects. If they don't actually work out to be the best, they'll just stagnate the market, and we'll be stuck with more inconvenient technology for longer. If a project isn't particularly profitable, and doesn't fit Google's ostensibly-benevolent goal, why keep it?

Of course, this is just the plan. It seems to be going well for now, under the direction of decent leaders who are okay with consuming profits for the perceived "greater good". Future profit-oriented leadership might turn "don't be evil" into "don't give away something for nothing". Intermediate measures (like complying with governments) could fetter some projects. A particular project could turn innocent civilians into zombies... The plan could take a turn for the worse, and we as a society would be royally screwed. Google may indeed be aiming to be a world-domineering overlord, but as long as it's a benevolent overlord, I'm okay with that.

As an aside, I swear I'm not a Google shill. I'm just focusing on the optimistic side in this post, because it's the side that seems to make the most sense to me.

Google is just like Microsoft.

[wvmarle]

Google's and Microsoft's behavious are very similar.

Google makes heaps of money with their search engine and advertising business; MS makes heaps of money with their Windows and Office products.

Both are extending into all kinds of related and not so related ventures.

Only difference there is that MS tends to go for already established business (XBox gaming console, Bing search engine, Zune music player) while Google is searching for new opportunities (networking with balloons and dark fibre; advanced automation with self driving cars, etc).

the basics are the same: make a lot of money in one product, use those massive profits to extend into other businesses, or simply to have some fun (not all of Google's experiments seem all to serious from a pure commercial pov).

Re:Google is just like Microsoft.

[binarylarry]

Google's projects are vastly, vastly Open Source though.

Microsoft considers Open Source literally "cancer."

Re:Google is just like Microsoft.

[Anonymous Coward]

Go easy on the poor word "literally". What you've said there is that something is literally figurative, which is kind of odd.

Re:Google is just like Microsoft.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, MS considers copyleft to be like a cancer. And many people seem to agree, which is precisely why you see so many businesses who won't touch GPL software with a 10 foot pole.

Also, Google only cares about open sourcing a product if it can be used to shuttle you to their proprietary products. Android and Chrome are open so that they can shuttle more people to proprietary Google Docs, proprietary Search, proprietary Google+, etc.

Google wants you to rely on the cloud, which is vastly worse for consumer freedom than Microsoft's traditional focus on local computing.

You need to get over your biases and open your eyes.

Re:Google is just like Microsoft.

[kthreadd]

Google's projects are seldom open source. You can't get the source code for most of their services. Many open source projects that they run is developed in the dark behind closed doors, lika Android; technically open source, but not in spirit.

Google is a very very closed company.

Re:Google is just like Microsoft.

[loufoque]

Many Google engineers contribute to open-source software, but they do so on their free time.
This gives a false impression that Google actually contributes to open-source.

Re:Google is just like Microsoft.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, it's true that Google doesn't give away all of their source code, but like Sun, they build almost everything around open standards. They are geeks that care about doing technology right, and hope to make some money. Microsoft wants to make money at all costs, and harm competitors, and if the technology is good, well, that's lucky.

Google mail supported IMAP and POP from the outset, when you had to pay for those features in Hotmail.
Google chat uses standard XMPP, while Microsoft cried about AOL blocking them - but at the same time tried actively to prevent 3rd party MSN clients from working.
Google releases open source languages and operating systems, while everyone is afraid Mono will die when Microsoft suddenly decides to sue.
Google supports not only MS Office formats, but OpenOffice formats on all their online office software. Microsoft grudgingly added worse-than-nothing half-assed OpenOffice file format support after bribing their way into standardizing their own format.
Google typically buys other companies with an eye to expanding their offerings (Writely, Google Earth, etc.) Microsoft often buys other companies with an eye to shutting them down to remove a competitor (Banyan Vines, FoxPro).
Microsoft often promises to support things, only to cancel them. Not consumer services that are easy to migrate away from by pulling your data out, but hardware support, etc. (Windows NT for PPC, Alpha, Windows Mobile for some processors, etc.)
Google offers open API support for most of their services, while Microsoft often attempts to make things incompatible (DR-DOS + Windows).

Most importantly, Microsoft has a history of lying, cheating, and sometimes breaking the law to get their way. They figure it's cheaper to pay fines, or that the legal system is too slow and inept for it to matter. (Purposely trying to Kill Netscape, making incompatible Java, etc.)

Microsoft also seems to go out of their way to not only make their stuff work well together (which is to be expected), but to also make it not work with anything else. There is no SQL server for Unix, Office for Mac is an exception, and not even that compatible. SharePoint only properly works on IE, .NET is supposedly cross-platform, but only supported on Windows, etc., etc. Microsoft also removed features they have already developed from entry level software to force you to buy the more expensive ones (which happens other places as well) - sometimes to silly levels. Versions of Windows that can only run 3 programs, limiting TCP/IP connections on consumer windows, no remote desktop or ability to install language packs on Windows 7 Home. The services that Google charges you for actually consume more of their resources, and therefore cost them more money.

Clearly MS feels much more strongly about wring every cent they can out of you than they do about advancing the state of the art or making the world a better place. Google, on the other hand, does things like telling you that results have been filtered due to legal requirements, and suggests you protest it.

Google takes the risk to invest in risky projects, and so it makes sense that they will cancel some of them. For example, I was peeved that they stopped supporting the iPhoto to Picasa Web uploader, but I can understand it. Apple broke the thing with every new iPhoto release. People would download it and wonder why it didn't work. Google also removed the public free translation API because people were using it in their very expensive commercial translation products. The only request I think that is reasonable to make is that if they are going to cancel something they: a. Do it with sufficient advance warning, and b. allow you to get your data out. They seem to have been very good at both things so far.

Re:Google is just like Microsoft.

[jedidiah]

> No, MS considers copyleft to be like a cancer. And many people seem to agree, which is precisely why you see so many businesses who won't touch GPL software with a 10 foot pole.

Most don't have a problem with the GPL. Many companies are quite happy to exploit the shared resource that is Free Software. All it requires is being civilized.

The main problem with the GPL comes from people that have a pathological need to take the work of others and treat it like their own exclusive property.

THAT is the only thing that the GPL prevents.

It turns out that such an infantile approach to software ownership is not actually required in order to make money building and selling it.

The GPL tries and make you play nice. Of course psychopaths are going to object to that.

Re:Google is just like Microsoft.

[binarylarry]

Only on Slashdot would a comment that dumb get modded +5 Insightful.

Re:Google is just like Microsoft.

[kthreadd]

Can you please point out where I'm wrong?

this is literally the most idiotic bullshit

[mapkinase]

this is literally the most idiotic bullshit I have seen recently on reddit. Good job, Soulskill

Re:this is literally the most idiotic bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, utter crap.

Google are acting more like venture capital, trying many things in the hope one in ten might strike it really big. Whoever wrote this is an idiot.

payouts come later

[flowerp]

Look at what they did with Android. Seemed like a crazy project at first, but now they're essentially owning the market for mobile operating systems.

So let them do their unfocused things, because some of them will pay out big later.

Re:payouts come later

[rasmusbr]

Or look at Amazon doing other things than selling books.

You don't want to put all your eggs in one or two baskets when you're operating in an industry where most everything changes completely in a decade. In fact, it might make sense from a risk perspective to enter into industries with slower rate of innovation and change like automotive, energy, etc.

Re:payouts come later

[wvmarle]

Amazon is a company that relies on two core businesses, and doesn't seem to expand much beyond that.

The first is being an online retailer. Started with books, added a host of other products - yet essentially it's still the same kind of business. Whether you sell books or CDs or furniture or houshold electronics or whatever doesn't matter very much - the products look different but the process is the same.

The second is their cloud computing business. They have numerous offerings there, from dedicated servers to computing power for hire to various cloud storage services - however in essence it is the same kind of business, and their various offerings often rely on one another. And of course their cloud computing business is a great support for the online retail business, which also needs a lot of computing power and networking.

Outside those two businesses, I don't know what Amazon is doing. They seem to be pretty much limited to those two pillars.

Re:payouts come later

[whisper_jeff]

How is that modded insightful?

I don't think anyone with a hint of awareness thought that Android sounded like a crazy project when they announced it. I think everyone who had a clue recognized it as a bold move into a new market that would make a big difference. And, lo and behold, it was.

Also, quite frankly, I find it amusing when people describe Android as "owning the market for mobile operating systems" because it's a narrowly defined definition of "owning the market".

Are they owning marketshare for the larger mobile market? Yes.

Smartphones (no, not feature phones disguised as smartphones - I'm talking actual smartphones)? That's debatable and hard to accurately measure (since so many Android manufacturers sell "smartphones" that are really feature phones running a smartphone OS). Entirely likely this one is pretty much a draw.

Tablets? Not at all. Getting crushed.

Are they owning the market dollars for the mobile market? Nope. That's iOS's crown. And, for many, this is what "owning the market" might mean which makes your claim incorrect.

The mobile market is actually quite complex with various facets and layers and "owning the market" is a claim that no operating system (well, neither Android nor iOS - the others don't matter any more) can make. You have to be much more specific in what you're talking about before you can say anything is being owned. Otherwise it's simply too vague a claim to be taken seriously.

But, back to the original point - I think the only people who thought Google was crazy for creating Android were blog writers looking to generate page views and controversy. Anyone with a clue saw it as anything but crazy.

Re:payouts come later

[Anonymous Coward]

The cloud computing business is purely a side business. The only reason they are in it at all is to monetize their infrastructure needs. Ever wonder why in the early years of EC2 is always slowed down at Christmas time? The infrastructure they were renting out was the excess capacity they need to add every Christmas season to meet demand. They started renting it out and then Christmas time came and they needed it all back, leaving EC2 customers in the lurch. They eventually grew it to the point where it is able to survive without affecting customers, but it is still simply renting excess capacity they don't need. I doubt it could survive without the retail sales business.

Re:payouts come later

[preflex]

Smartphones (no, not feature phones disguised as smartphones - I'm talking actual smartphones)? That's debatable and hard to accurately measure (since so many Android manufacturers sell "smartphones" that are really feature phones running a smartphone OS). Entirely likely this one is pretty much a draw.

What on earth are you blathering about?

Re:payouts come later

[asavage]

Tablets? Not at all. Getting crushed.

They might be in the US but in 2013Q1 Android was on 56% of global tablet sales

Re:payouts come later

[R3d M3rcury]

Outside those two businesses, I don't know what Amazon is doing. They seem to be pretty much limited to those two pillars.

Check out this crazy thing that Amazon has been doing for the past few years.

Re:payouts come later

[R3d M3rcury]

Well, "Revenue Share" is important for investors. Not so much for customers. When was the last time you bought a product based upon how much money the company made selling the product?

The rationale behind Android is very simple for Google: they need an open platform to sell their wares.

Think back to 2009. Google's Voice app was languishing away waiting for Apple approval, which would never come. Now, I don't care about the reasons. Maybe it was a deal Apple had with AT&T. Maybe it was that the dialer would cause confusion. The reality is that Apple blocked it for whatever reasons.

Suppose others start doing the same thing? Could Microsoft block Google apps? Or RIM? When your money comes from selling advertising, the last thing you want is for some OS maker to arbitrarily decide to block you for whatever reason. Google needed a popular open platform for people to use or risk being cut off from the eyeballs due to some sort of corporate deal-making.

Re:payouts come later

[preflex]

Marketing people, however, quickly realized that adding "smartphone" to a product's description helped push units so a whole bunch of feature phones running Android have been labeled as smartphones.

It's a meaningless distinction, defined by marketing people in the first place. From wikipedia:

"While a feature phone is a low-end device and smartphone a high-end one, there is no standard way of distinguishing them. Smartphone and feature phone are not mutually exclusive categories.[emphasis mine] A complication in distinguishing between smartphones and feature phones is that over time the capabilities of new models of feature phones can increase to exceed those of phones that had been promoted as smartphones in the past."

So, what are you blathering about? Is the original iPhone a smartphone or a featurephone? Is my n900 a smartphone? The line you draw is completely arbitrary.

Discontinue Unsuccessful Products

[tuppe666]

Except closing down projects

I have a bookshelf behind me with a whole host of dead languages, and products from Adobe and Microsoft that have been discontinued. Unsuccessful (and sometimes successful for strategic reasons) software will be discontinues, companies are trying to make money.

FYI Googles Enterprise Apps doesn't get Ads...maybe you are thinking of Windows 8.

Re:Discontinue Unsuccessful Products

[kthreadd]

Well if you built your app with Visual Basic 6 then you're still supported. It has been discontinued, won't get new features. But it works, and will work for a while so that you have enough time to migrate to something newer such as Visual Basic .NET.

Re:Discontinue Unsuccessful Products

[gaspyy]

What discontinued Adobe product are you talking about? It's a serious question.
They either transitioned the software (GoLive to Dreamweaver for example) or they still support it (Framemaker, Director).

I can't think of any of their products that was abruptly discontinued without an upgrade path or support for quite a long time.

Re:Discontinue Unsuccessful Products

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if you built your app with Visual Basic 6 then you're still supported. It has been discontinued, won't get new features.

But if you built your app around Plays for Sure then you're out of luck.

Re:Discontinue Unsuccessful Products

[Errol backfiring]

If you call "that is a known bug" support, then you are right. Basic controls like radio buttons are not working on Windows XP. And they won't fix it.

Re:Discontinue Unsuccessful Products

[kthreadd]

I'm not familiar with VB6 or XP. I just heard the sound of relief when it was announced that the VB6 runtime would be supported in Windows 8; so apparently it works at least good enough.

Re:Discontinue Unsuccessful Products

[kthreadd]

I have some bad memories of old Persuasion files. I don't think there was an upgrade path for that as far as I know.

Re:Discontinue Unsuccessful Products

[Anonymous Coward]

FoxPro is EOL. Dead. Runtimes wouldn't install on Vista or above. No support. Nadda.

Re:Discontinue Unsuccessful Products

[gaspyy]

I stand corrected. Indeed it looks like the Persuasion was simply abandoned and none of their programs can read those files.

Re:Discontinue Unsuccessful Products

[phantomfive]

But if you built your app around Plays for Sure then you're out of luck.

Which is why the companies that used Plays for Sure were really upset.

Re:Discontinue Unsuccessful Products

[Cenan]

If you call "that is a known bug" support, then you are right. Basic controls like radio buttons are not working on Windows XP. And they won't fix it.

That sentence beats "system won't run on, period.", there really are no cheap alternatives to "not running", there are plenty of cheap alternatives to a goddamn radio button control though. Where I work, we have a lot of old shit we still need to support, crap that predates Windows XP by quite a few years. Stability is everything, fuck the broken buttons and the wierdo way it generates reports, as long as it still runs we can work with it.

Re:Discontinue Unsuccessful Products

[dgatwood]

What discontinued Adobe product are you talking about? It's a serious question.

I was personally affected by Adobe discontinuing FrameMaker for Mac and Premiere for Mac. Alternatively, by some definition, Adobe discontinued nearly all of their apps. You can't buy them anymore; you have to rent them, because Adobe discontinued their entire Creative Suite. At least for me, that's not a viable upgrade path, particularly from a company who has bitten me by discontinuing products not once, but twice.

Google is just like Microsoft in your dreams.

[tuppe666]

Google's and Microsoft's behavious are very similar.

Not even close. Microsoft is the same lumbering bullying monopolist it always was(although now looking stupid in todays mobile market), and Google acts like fresh young startup(although now with lots of baggage).

Other than them both being mega corporations, they have very little in common. This could be a whole topic in itself.

Re:Google is just like Microsoft in your dreams.

[Errol backfiring]

Err, no. Microsoft is a megacorp that just tries to take over anything IT-related. Google is a megacorp that tries to take over anything IT-related. Not much of a difference.

Re:Google is just like Microsoft in your dreams.

[ilguido]

You can try to take over something without using the scorched earth tactics employed by MS, you know.

Good someone's spending money on innovation

[monzie]

Disclaimer: Not an MBA, never attended even a Biz 101. Just your average geek

I think we are talking about two distinct things here:

1. A company which makes a lot of money selling ads on the 'standard' web and the mobile web

2. A company that is trying to carve a space in the 'enterprise' space ( Google apps, docs etc )

3. A company that is spending a lot of money on innovation - most of which looks to help the general public ( Specifically mean their attempts at networking ) and some which look like sci-fi projects ( Google glass)

#1 - It's how they earn their $$ and I ( like most of you ) use their search engine and email offerings. A lot of us use their mobile operating system as well - and we take for granted that it keeps our contacts and calendars and other stuff in sync. ( side note: not many , especially the Apple fanbois - appreciate how good google email/calendar/contacts sync is )

#2 My previous and current employer use Google Apps. My previous company migrated from Domino/Notes (gasp!) to Google Apps and my current company moved from Exchange/Sharepoint/Outlook to Google Apps. As an end user it made my life much better. However, I am sure the CIO who took the decision for the move had evaluated other factors as well ( Cost of migration, cost of maintaing , integration with exisiting directory services etc )

#3 - Now let's assume they make a ton of money with #1 and #2 ( in reality they're making money primarily with #1, but bear with me) and they spend their money on Gigabit Ethernet and self driving cars. What's so wrong with that? How does spending money on Gigabit ethernet make their Google Apps or Google Search team any smarter/dumber? Answer: It doesn't.

I do not work for Google and Google doesn't need my defence.

I just think this article and post is pointless. This is a question a shareholder may ask. As an end user I"m happy with their offerings for personal and professional work and even they work on a new variant of the NCC-1701* - It wouldn't matter to me or to my CIO as long as what they offer us is better than the competition. As of now, they are.

* = If you do not know what NCC-1701 (and it's variants are) Google it (pun intended) before you reply

Re:Good someone's spending money on innovation

[Sollord]

Half the problem these days directly relate to the MBA degrees infact I'd say workplace negativity directly tracks the increase in the number of MBA holders

Re:Good someone's spending money on innovation

[wbr1]

Are you sure you are not an MBA? You stated that there were two main items and listed three. Sounds like funny MBS math to me. (Lets just slip this in there, no one will notice) .

Re:Good someone's spending money on innovation

[wvmarle]

Agreed, I can't say I have the feeling they lost their focus. When it comes to their core products (Search, Maps) they're still miles ahead of the competition. And for the rest they offer a very decent offering (Gmail, Docs, Google+, Android, etc). Not much better or worse than the competition there, they still manage to stay at the top.

Can't say that of Microsoft - falling behind with Windows (they still have the critical mass though), IE caught napping by FF and Chrome, totally lost the mobile market, and the rest of their products are generally faltering and also-runs at best. Office is arguably the best in it's league but the competition is catching up quickly, with "more than good enough for the home user" type products. Not much room for innovation in Office too.

Re:Good someone's spending money on innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. We need somebody in this country to do R&D type stuff because a lot of other companies have given up on it. Besides it's also good to see a company that actually does something with it's money because that's actually a lot more useful to the local economy than just sitting on it and trying to maximize productivity or profit value or whatever. (Seems the world forgot that when companies do stuff like this, then its employees usually end up having money, and when they have it - they tend to spend that money. It really does more for more people than stock holders that will just sit on it or trade it back and forth for some other stock that doesn't really do anything for anyone other than themselves.)

Re:Good someone's spending money on innovation

[Bing Tsher E]

You stated that there were two main items and listed three. Sounds like funny MBS math to me.

The 'two' bullet points and the 'three' bullet points were supposed to be on separate PowerPoint slides. Slashdot mangled his presentation.

We should count ourselves lucky

[joh]

If Google REALLY would try to do what it could do in some fields instead of rather helplessly fumbling around often enough, it could very soon get into a dominating position that wouldn't be good for anyone.

I think people underestimate the extremely central point in which Google has comfortably positioned itself. We should be happy about every lackluster move Google does. And of course it is reigned in by being an advertisement business which means that it doesn't really care about anything that isn't connected to selling more ads. This explains a lot of the half-heartedness it displays in many things. It's just not worth the effort to destroy other businesses if you can't make money out of it.

Google has a problem.

[pla]

Google exists primarily as a playground for two (actually much, much more, now) geeks. They want to do things like build driverless cars and have robot cats and sharks with frickin' laser beams.

Unfortunately, Google accidentally became too successful, and would have needed to start filing SEC disclosures even if they hadn't gone public. So hey, free money.

Now, Google has a problem, not unlike that of John Rigas or Dennis Kozlowski (minus the criminal aspect of it, of course) - Brin and Page both see Google as their private playground, but have to pretend they give the least damn about their shareholders... Thus, the whole reason they brought on Eric Schmidt early on, to do all that boring BS business-stuff while they play with online weather balloons.

But make no mistake, evil or no, Google exists as a high-tech playground, not a serious business. The fact that they make oodles of money should serve as a role-model to other companies who haven't come to grips with the fact that "knowledge" workers do their best when not forced to sit in a 6x6 box for exactly eight hours a day using only "approved" apps and hardware.

Re:Google has a problem.

[su5so10]

In the OLD days (e.g. up through the early 1990s), MOST successful tech companies had research labs doing far out things. AT&T, Xerox, DEC, IBM... I think the fact that today, few companies have such a research arm, is the real problem.

Re:Google has a problem.

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

I don't see how Google can lose, in light of how MS seems to be hell-bent on killing itself with the atrocious Windows H8. What Google's doing is actually innovating. Yeah, it's a playground for a couple of geek billionaires. I don't see that as a bad thing at all. You can argue persuasively that the company has jumped the shark and is no longer "doing no evil," but they're investing big bucks into pure research. Once in a while they come up with the (tm)Next Big Thing, like Android, and they make a killing. Meanwhile, Ballmer throws chairs and tries to *copy* Android smartphones even on the Windows desktop.

Re:Google has a problem.

[pellik]

What has google done that is just for the enjoyment of it's founders? What I see when I look at google is a company striving to get it's feet in the door of the markets it thinks will be dominant in 20-30 years. They want to be at the forefront of wearable computers. They want to drive your car for you. They want in on the internet access business.

Try to imagine the world post-singularity. Now look at what google is doing. Heck, they even have a program named 'Singularity-U' where they bring together people they think will be influential in the future for networking. Their position seems crystal clear to me.

Re:Google has a problem.

[Bing Tsher E]

Brin and Page sort of see Google as a big giant Xerox PARC.

Probably that's what got Steve Jobs so furious at them, actually. He saw it that way, too, but at critical points in time, Apple was prevented from stealing their stuff.

Re:Google has a problem.

[swillden]

In the OLD days (e.g. up through the early 1990s), MOST successful tech companies had research labs doing far out things. AT&T, Xerox, DEC, IBM... I think the fact that today, few companies have such a research arm, is the real problem.

I think Google takes this concept a bit further, than those companies did, though, investing a far larger percentage of revenues into R&D, and even encouraging engineers whose day job isn't R&D to spend part of their time building new things.

To attract talent

[ByTor-2112]

What better way to attract the best nerds than high altitude wi-fi balloons? All those crazy projects attract people who want to feel their career won't be confined.

Re:To attract talent

[Bing Tsher E]

That's a tricky balancing act, because people who don't want to feel their career is confined don't hook their wagon to an 'Enterprise' operation. Small start-ups: skunkworks, and 'Siberia' engineering outfits are what attract the best nerds. Those can be fostered inside of giant companies, but only if the fucking 'Enterprise' suit-types get shut out.

Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is in the enviable position of having most search traffic coming to them. Search is a lot of what people do on the internet. If people's use of the internet increases, so will their use of search and that increases Google's bottom line. Search is wildly lucrative, so Google is in the amazing position that it actually makes sense for them to pay for projects that do not return any profit but that will increase people's use of the internet and thus make more people use Google search. Some of that innovation then might even pay on its own too. A lot of what Google does, like building out broadband or sending up balloons, in fact supports their search business, you just have to think about it for a bit to realize it. When the internet gets better, Google profits.

Like John Sculley's Apple in the early '90s

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many contenders for the New New Thing, and the company seems determined to bet on every horse. One difference is that Sculley, a consumer marketing executive, was trying to prove to the world that he was a visionary leader in the technology field. The Google twins don't have to do that.

Old joke:
Q. What's the difference between Apple Computer and the Boy Scouts?
A. The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.

Irrelevant

[Tridus]

The only relevant things about Google's enterprise performance should be how seriously they treat those offerings. That they're playing around with driverless cars on the side really doesn't matter in the slightest.

If it does, then obviously people should be equally concerned that Microsoft is more focused on trying to sell phones and Xboxes than it is on what their enterprise customers are actually using (since they're sure as hell not using Windows 8).

Google should put more effort into *quality*

[Anonymous Coward]

enterprise products, and services.

Google Apps hardly work well enough for a hobbyist, let alone an enterprise. There are serious bugs that have existed for years, Google chooses to ignore them. Google does offer any real support.

And yes, Google's habit of constantly closing down products, and services, even those which are successful, does not sit well with enterprise customers.

Google makes about 97% of it's revenue on advertising. Everything else is just some silly little back-burner project that Google employees are supposed to do in their spare time.

Seems to me that is Google is going to compete with a juggernaut, like Microsoft, Google needs to take it's products, and services, seriously.

All these activities are still related

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

They are all about gathering user activities data to provide more target advertising. The more your stuff are being used by consumers in their life, the better you can profile and predict their future behavior.

If Google start getting into, let say, food, oil or pharmaceutical business, then you can start complaining about them being a conglomerate.

Large List for Adobe

[tuppe666]

Here is a list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Macromedia_software My personal favourite from Adobe Drumbeat which replaced by Dreamweaver UltraDev is wasn't Adobe bought it as it was a competitor and killed it off.

Wait...

[nbritton]

Wait... why does Google want to compete with Microsoft? Last I knew they were in different market spaces. Sure theirs Bing and web apps, but isn't that about it? I think Google's doing just fine, a little diversification never hurt anyone.

Re:Wait...

[spacepimp]

Google with Google Apps and Cloud Computing and with them slowly moving G+ into an intranet for business is headed squarely into MS Territory. This is a direct challenge to hosted Sharepoint/Exchange/Sky Drive.

Improve Search

[amanaplanacanalpanam]

I wouldn't mind if Google focused at least some effort on improving search, such as

• - make domain clustering optional (like it used to be: initially present all results within a given domain as "one" result, with a breakout link to show all results from just that domain; maybe display PageRank (*gasp*) to indicate that there are multiple "authoritative/popular" pages within a given domain);
• - add more powerful advanced search options. Something like "search for 'X', but don't count instances of X that are part of the phrase 'X Y'." For example I want to search for word X, but I'm not interested in instances of unrelated phrase "X Y", however some pages that contain "X Y" might also have some relevant info regarding "X", so I would want to see those pages, but only ranked highly if "X" is prevalent in the page, not "X Y". As far as I'm aware Google currently offers no way to do this.

Microsoft killed FoxPro at 1,500,000 users.

[Futurepower(R)]

Someone at Microsoft told me that FoxPro had 1.5 million active users. The next year Microsoft killed FoxPro.

The story is worse than that. dBase was a dependable language with many suppliers. Microsoft introduced odd extensions to the language that caused Microsoft's version to be incompatible. People would use the extensions without realizing the social issues.

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

I don't know why Microsoft did that. Microsoft sometimes seems to want to act out abusiveness more than it wants to make money.

There could have been a conversion program that helped users migrate to another language.

Re:Microsoft killed FoxPro at 1,500,000 users.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Microsoft supposedly surveyed Visual Foxpro devs prior to the .NET rollout. They preferred not changing the language to make it .NET compatible. That signed its death warrant. We aggressively migrated away from it at that point.

Re:Microsoft killed FoxPro at 1,500,000 users.

[fredrated]

The place I work still has Clipper Summer '87 applications doing work. It still compiles, even under Windows 7!

Re:Microsoft killed FoxPro at 1,500,000 users.

[Ravaldy]

Thank god they didn't hold back progress for FoxPro. .NET has made dev on MS much more compatible and maintainable.

Re:Microsoft killed FoxPro at 1,500,000 users.

[DocSavage64109]

Where I work, we use a childcare database called ezcare2. As of their latest version, it's still based on foxpro. They've even managed to get it to install on windows 8 machines.

Re:Microsoft killed FoxPro at 1,500,000 users.

[An ominous Cow art]

FoxPro (and the other xBase languages) were never standardized to a great extent. They were all more-or-less compatible with various versions of Ashton-Tate's dBase, but that's where it stopped. All had their own extensions. That said, I was disappointed when MS eventually stopped developing VFP. While the language has bad parts, it also has its good points, and my company uses it to this day, though I prefer doing my development in Python as much as possible.

Tech. co's often fail because of social issues.

[Futurepower(R)]

"There is no real reason why Google can't do all of these things."

Google is not attending to the social issues inside the company, in my opinion. We study the sociology of technology companies intensely because we have found that they often fail because of social issues.

Here is a short list: Fairchild Semiconductor, Hewlett-Packard (HP), and Tektronix. At one time they were the best in their fields.

HP began failing long before most people noticed. Products were released and sold that weren't finished even before 1973.

See our web site for more examples.

Friendly Neighbourhood Conspiracy Theorist here...

[jenningsthecat]

...wondering if perhaps Google has simply become a master of advertising and marketing in its own right, rather than being just the middleman. All of these projects make Google seem cool and geek-friendly, and keep Google brand front-and-centre in a mostly positive light. With all of their slick-new-project churn they simply look less moribund and uncool than either Microsoft or Apple, even as they're becoming a more staid and conservative company. And with their seemingly limitless supply of dollars, the cost of these projects is probably chump change to them.

It's also possible that they've chosen to 'throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks'. There's something to be said for the experimental approach to learning what large numbers of people will pay for, and Google has always struck me as being much stronger strategically than tactically.

imagine this article from a few decades ago...

[Lluc]

This article summary from a few decades ago:

Bell Labs' Crazy Lack of Focus -- Is it Serous about Telephones?
From semiconductors, to photovoltaics, to computer operatings systems, Bell Labs has wanders aimlessly from topic to topic. How will these ever apply to the copper lines strung across the world to carry our telephone conversations?? Doesn't Bell Labs know that it should only invest in ideas and technology that can pay off within 3 years?

Re:imagine this article from a few decades ago...

[oh_my_080980980]

So you hate the free market....or rather your argument is that capitalism does not produce innovation.....

Re:imagine this article from a few decades ago...

[MacTenchi]

And where is Bell Labs now? Exactly.

Re:Useful Products

[spacepimp]

They haven't. They are doing incredibly useful things with webRTC etc.

Replace MSWord

[lfp98]

Their strategy with GoogleDocs/GoogleDrive is truly incomprehensible. Seven years after its launch, it is still pathetically primitive, lacks even the most essential functions like detailed formatting of figures and legends. DOS WordPerfect was more sophisticated. MS-Word is a terrible program, still crash-prone, expensive, frustrating and distracting. It cries out for a replacement, even though almost every enterprise and public sector institution is dependent on it. Google engineers can make a self-driving car, you'd think they could program a decent word processor in an afternoon. It's clear they're not even trying. Why??

Re:Replace MSWord

[PPH]

Why?

Because R&D projects are fun for a few years. But once you have an actual product, you have to commit to supporting and improving it. Not so much fun for the whiz-kid CS grads fresh out of school.

Re:Replace MSWord

[DNS-and-BIND]

Because Google itself doesn't have to use Google Docs. That's why. It's for *users*.

Re:Replace MSWord

[oh_my_080980980]

Which is why you have management. Management sets the direction and strategy for the company. Not CS graduates. Google has no interest in corporate clients.

Re:Replace MSWord

[PPH]

And then the whiz kids quit and go to work for some cool startup. Management has set the culture for Google and they just have to like with the consequences.

Re:Replace MSWord

[Art3x]

even the most essential functions like detailed formatting of figures and legends

Are you serious?

DOS WordPerfect was more sophisticated

Did DOS WordPerfect allow several people to edit a file at the same time, showing each person's changes right away, in nothing but a web browser?

Google engineers can make a self-driving car, you'd think they could program a decent word processor in an afternoon

Are you a programmer? As a web programmer for many years, I feel it would be easier to make a self-driving car than a word processor that does everything Microsoft Word does, plus the aforementioned web features.

Re:Replace MSWord

[swillden]

Because Google itself doesn't have to use Google Docs. That's why. It's for *users*.

Google makes very heavy use of Google Docs. It's the format for internal documentation, presentations, spreadsheets, etc. I've been at Google for over two years and never seen anything done in LibreOffice, much less MS Office.

Re:Replace MSWord

[scribble73]

Even successful services at Google can die. Looking at their history, Google kills about three out of five successful services.

Google services usually experience an influx of popularity and income when first released. Over time, they gradually return a smaller fraction of their expenses. When a mature service begins to lose money, Management decides whether to update itor to kill it. Maybe a third of the time, management decides to kill it. It only takes a few decision cycles for an individual service and its number comes up.

Projects supporting services are kept loosely coupled. This works in Google's favor. This minimizes the effect that killing a service has on other services. When a service dies, most members are simply laid off -- even the good ones. The rest of the workforce seldom finds out. Over time, it is risky to work at Google.

Google is full of services that are on their way to dying, including Google Sites and Google Docs. Employees use these services internally, but they are woefully behind their competition and are becoming a productivity bottleneck. I believe they are close to being re-evaluated. With competing open source services like WordPress and LibreOffice, it might be easy for Google to just open source the code and reassign (or lay off) project employees.

Microsoft is also neglecting MS Word for similar reasons. MS Word is a bloated, mature app that doesn't make much money any more. It has collected lots of bugs that are expensive to fix. There isn't enough money to fix them. The new Ribbon UI has failed in the marketplace. It is bundled with an Office Suite that has its own problems. Some open source word processors are now better in many ways. Microsoft could have a Google surprise in store for us.

tt77

The one that makes money....

[oh_my_080980980]

Google isn't interested in anything else....which basically means they are not interested in the enterprise.

Re:Core business and how long it will last

[oh_my_080980980]

Google does not innovate. They take existing markets and create their version and market it as something "different."

Re:Backward compatibility is what they need to lea

[oh_my_080980980]

The simple explanation is Microsoft and other venders understand enterprise customers. Enterprise does not change instantly. So for a company that likes to change it's strategy on a dime, the enterprise market is not for you.

Xerox's crazy lack of focus with PARC

[dbIII]

Xerox's crazy lack of focus with PARC, and what's Bell labs doing mucking about with semiconductors instead of making telephones?

Competing for Ruler

[Xicor]

google is perfectly capable of ousting just about every company currently in the tech world. hats off to them! im tired of paying huge sums of money for internet when i know that the companies would still profit if they were offering it at 1/10 the price. I want to see google succeed in destroying all the greedy companies and bring forth a new generation of technological availability

Re:I'm going to vomit.

[Cenan]

Check UIDs. I'm COLD FJORD(826450). User COID FJORD(2949869) has impersonated me. Don't confuse us if he trolls you.

That sig is counter productive to your intent, donchathink?

Don't believe ANY of it. Here's why

[Kimomaru]

Every publicly held company loses it, eventually. It's difficult to argue that, next to the invention of the internet, Google search is one of the most important technologies in history. First we created content, then Google made it totally accessible.

So, what's left after for you to do after that? Well, if you're a publicly held company and investors are yelling at you to find a way to get the stock price up, you really start coming up with stupid ideas. Google Glass is a face-mounted camera. Google+ takes FB's nonsensicle model and warps it even more so that no matter what Google product you use, it's tied into this garbage (nevermind that Google got it right the first time when they create advertising that was relevant to your INTERESTS, not who your friends and relatives are.)

Google's made enough of an impact on history, to the point where if they didn't come up with anything new or novel ever again, it'd be fine. I'm not sure if their self-driving car will make any progress - god knows we need it, most people can't drive to begin with and should just leave robots to do it. I just don't think they're going to accomplish it.

Re:I'm going to vomit.

[cold fjord]

His original purpose was counterproductive, and now he is going for the gold. Sad, really. But, he needs the sig to look like me again.

Partial-word searches...

[linatux]

When I can do partial-word searches on Gmail and Drive I'll believe Google is interested in corporate customers.
Google is primarily a search company & you can't do partial-word searches on email - what's up with that?

This is weird.

[strikethree]

Are there Microsoft sponsored folks here sponsoring these "articles" that question Google all the time? What the fuck? We are all able to see Google just fine and these constant stream of articles are not affecting my views other than to notice a distinct astroturfing campaign against Google. Keep it up. D'oh.

Both

[timkofu196]

I think they can do both just fine.