Slashdot Mirror
Actually, It's Google That's Eating the World
waderoush writes "An Xconomy column [Friday] suggests that Google is getting too big. When the company was younger, most of its acquisitions related to its core businesses of search, advertising, network infrastructure, and communications. More recently, it's been colonizing areas with a less obvious connection to search, such as travel, social networking, productivity, logistics, energy, robotics, and — with the acquisition this week of Nest Labs — home sensor networks and automation. A Google acquisition can obviously mean a big payoff for startup founders and their investors, but as the company grows by accretion it may actually be slowing innovation in Silicon Valley (since teams inside the Googleplex, with its endless fountain of AdWords revenue, can stop worrying about making money or meeting market needs). And by infiltrating so many corners of consumers' lives — and collecting personal and behavioral data as it goes — it's becoming an all-encompassing presence, and making itself ever more attractive as a target for marketers, data thieves, and government snoops. 'Any sufficiently advanced search, communications, and sensing infrastructure is indistinguishable from Big Brother,' the column argues."
How's their colony on LV-426 doing?
Why does every idiotic rambling monologue filled with vague predictions of doom based on the idea that Google is too successful have to be given a place on the front page?
Silicon Valley used to be a truly remarkable place. It was where industry and the future truly did collide head-on. And because of this, great things happened there.
Hewlett-Packard. Fairchild Semiconductor. Xerox PARC. Intel. Sun Microsystems. Cisco Systems.
Those were the kind of names we came to associate with very advanced technological achievement. They earned our respect with the tremendous advances they made.
But then something happened. Silicon Valley ceased to be about a productive, beneficial future. It became about a shitty, rotten future. It became about "social media". It became about advertising. It became about a disturbing level of data collection and mining.
The Silicon Valley of today is a mere shell of what it once was. Clad in fedora hats and rampant hipsterism, Silicon Valley of today is a sissified, degenerate place. Gone are the real scientists and engineers who advanced technology for all of mankind. Gone are their advances. Gone are the hope they brought.
I weep for Silicon Valley. It truly does make me quite distraught to think about what has happened to it. One of the greatest intellectual creations ever to existed has been crushed by men who wear tight jeans and glasses without lenses. It has been dragged through the mud by overweight, unshaven manchildren wearing stained shirts with shitty Japanese drawings on them. It has been shit upon repeatedly by self-styled "entrepreneurs" and "engineers" whose only talent is unjustifiable self promotion.
It is too late to save Silicon Valley. But other technologically-inclined regions should take note of what happened there. Keep away the hipsters. Keep away the bearded manchildren. Keep away the "entrepreneurs" and "engineers" who spew forth about Ruby on Rails. These people are an infection, and this infection will destroy even the most robust of technological and industrial communities. Do not let them ruin your community like they ruined Silicon Valley's.
It is rude to randomly redirect visitors to beta.slashdot.
Even more so because beta sucks.
Providing a hard to find opt-out, http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1, just upgrades the aggravation level from "rude" to "insulting and infuriating".
The only acceptable option is, as always, opt-in.
I guess you need reminding. a lot.
You say this like it's a bad thing.
Sounds to me like freedom to try really crazy/cool ideas that may not be immediately financially viable.
Actually, i think Google knows that it is getting too big: the breakneck speed of acquisitions is the result of the intent, to get as big as they can before a more confining regulation sets in.
You're not alone.
As somebody who has worked in the software industry for decades now, I find it stunning that the Slashdot beta project has not been terminated yet. It's a failure in every single sense. The users here almost all absolutely hate it. It looks worse than the existing site. It functions worse than the existing site. I think it's slower than the existing site. There is so much wasted empty space. The fonts are harder to read. The discussion is much, much more difficult to follow. It's harder to post a comment. Being forced to use it unexpectedly affects users trying to use the existing site!
And those comparisons are to an existing Slashdot site that was Web 2.0-ified a while back, making it even shittier than the site that preceded it!
While we should be accustomed to social media web sites shitting all over their users with bad redesigns, Slashdot is really taking it a step beyond with this beta site. I can sincerely see a Digg v4-style disaster happening again if the beta site goes live, it's just that bad. The beta will drive away the few remaining users of value.
I sure hope that Slashdot does the right thing, and puts an end to this beta site project. Nothing good will come out of it, aside from lessons about what not to do. Everything about the beta site is just plain bad. Terminate the project, throw away the code, and move on. And do this well before the beta site ever replaces the current one!
SV went from scientists and engineers selling a new product they invented to a bunch of dorks who are trying to get rich quick.
When I see someone with an over inflated ego call herself a JavaScript "Engineer" (engineer?! Oh, please!) who is has this incredible "innovation" (Just Another Fucking Social Media/Pimp Subscriber's Data for Ads and Marketing software), I just shake my head and see that SV has jumped the shark,
I AM seeing some incredible innovations in healthcare in ...wait for it ... India. American trained Indian doctors are giving superior healthcare at a fraction of the price to some of the poorest people on Earth. And the docs are STILL making a very nice living - if not more because of the processes they invented. Win/win!!
THAT is exciting and Innovative.
This is what a successful mega-corporation does when opportunities for growth within its primary revenue stream stagnate, or at least taper off.
Good for consumers? Hardly. Competition, rather than consolidation, is generally in the better interest of the average buyer.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
and Apple too, to powerful with its digital music and its (gasp) Walled Garden.
Abusive definitely, their behaviour in the disgusting Book caper where they raised the price of Ebooks for none Apple users is something they continue to act unapologetic . The Control they have with Carriers forcing none Apple users again to pay for Apples products. I would argue their control of Digital music is still too high...fortunately the trend for that has dropped. As for the Walled garden thing...I am not really sure how it is related; The FSF protected Apple users from Apple!? allowing jailbreak to be legal again. Personally though I think people should be made aware of Apple abuses and alternatives exist.
Isn't this a Google Article?
I'd say they are becoming more like "Buy N Large" from Wall-E - all pervasive, all providing.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
So it isn't grey goo after all, just goo.
They will grow far to large and bloated, people will call from them to be broken up, and the anti-trust lawsuits will follow. It seems to be a vicious cycle that every large American tech company goes through. In 20 years time we will start seeing the articles "How Google lost its mojo" and "Google strives to get back on top". Its inevitable.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan
Google has always been in the data business. Putting sensors into our homes fits perfectly into that business model.
I looked into this recently, and was kind of surprised at what I found.
Mostly, my surprise is that they aren't that big. By revenue, they are 55th on the Fortune 500 list. For comparison, Dell is 51. Now Google is far more profitable, has a much larger market cap, and is growing very quickly... but still, I was shocked that they aren't larger. If you get a lot of your news from tech press like I do, then you could be led to believe that Google is swallowing up the world. But in fact, they are still smaller than Amazon, smaller than Microsoft, half the size of IBM, and 1/3 the size of Apple. Google definitely gets an outsized amount of press attention compared to their revenue, and get blamed for a lot of things that their size just doesn't support.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
ante hoc ergo non propter hoc.
What? Dividends (or share buybacks, which are functionally similar) are the obvious answer to that. Dividends inject money back into the economy far more directly than any other activity a corporation can take. Personal anecdote - when my grandmother was alive, she had a fair chunk of shares of a regional bank. When I was young, I would always look forward to the one day every three months when her dividend check arrived, because she would take the whole family out for a nice dinner, and then would take me shopping at the local bookstore.
I have seen a couple of studies that indicate money paid as dividends is about 7% more economically productive than money retained as cash holdings or expended on investments (either capital improvements or acquisitions). I know there was a slightly informal study by Arnott & Asness with this conclusion, and there was a much more rigorous study by a guy whose name I can't remember right now (something Llosa something?) which said the same thing.
I know dividends are an alien concept to many tech companies, but Intel can manage to pay out 47% of its profits as dividends, while still funding massive fab and R&D investments with very little debt. If Intel can do that, Google can, and should, do the same unless they can make an extremely convincing argument that acquisitions will be more beneficial. And the problem with Google is that most of the voting stock is owned by Sergei, Larry, and Eric, so they're not really accountable to their shareholders (or anyone else).
I'd say they are becoming more like "Buy N Large" from Wall-E - all pervasive, all providing.
BNL was also the government.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Er, no. Go read a history of Google. The search engine came first and for several years they had no idea how to fund it at all. They sold search services to Yahoo and Netscape. They put their code in a box and tried to sell the Google Search Appliance. They did a bunch of other random things before they eventually tried out keyword based advertising. To say the search engine was a byproduct of a desire to serve ads just makes you look like an idiot who is making stuff up as you go along.
Using the internet at all is opt-in.
Want to try again?
It is as opt-in as making phone calls. If you don't do either, most probably the NSA doesn't intercept your communications. Therefore according to your logic, NSA is opt-in as well.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Market cap is a measure of how big/profitable the market thinks the company will be someday, not how large the company is now. The market may very well be right, and Google may someday swallow the earth - but today, the idea that they are this unprecedented or exceptionally large entity is a little exaggerated.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I agree with that statement. I think we are basically saying the same thing. A company with poor future prospects will have a low stock price, even if it is currently doing well. A company with bright prospects (like Google) will trade well above what it's current finances warrant. The true value of a company is quite obviously the current stock price.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
living is opt in.
want to join realty?
Probably not coincidentally, both are in far more business-friendly states than California (last in the nation).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?