Posts about google
Podcasts, podcasts, podcasts
I have two podcasts to plug this week:
* The latest Guardian Media Talk USA podcast is up. David Folkenflik, NPR correspondent, and John Temple, ex editor of the Rocky Mountain News and now a damned fine media blogger, and I talk about the AP, the TechCrunch/Twitter affair, and news as charity. I also interview Josh Cohen, product manager of Google News.
* Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani, and I recorded the inaugural edition of This Week in Google (TWiG). You can watch it in video here and listen to the podcast here. We discuss all kinds of things: Apple (AT&T) blocking Google Voice; the importance of Google Wave and the live web; the AP (again); Gmail getting rid of that damned “on behalf of”; Microsoft Office (finally) going into the cloud. Great fun.
I wish I could embed both of them here (hint, hint) but go take a listen and please subscribe.
Guardian column: Micohoo vs. Gulliver
My Guardian column this week on the Microhoo search lashup:
In bringing together their search traffic, Microsoft and Yahoo are fighting an unwinnable war. Worse, they are still fighting the last war. . . .But while they pound their little fists on Google’s shins, Google remains the unchallenged giant in the arena that really matters: advertising revenue. According to the blog Search Engine Land, Google takes almost a third of all online advertising money – $21bn a year – and it doesn’t rely just on search.
And Google is turning to the next battlefields: mobile, social media, the live web, and online tools. . . .
Yahoo can now jettison the technology resources that went into search. That’s rather sad. After all, 15 years ago, it was Yahoo that first organised the web for us. Its original ambition seems quaintly naive today: human editors cataloguing every site worth visiting and deciding which were the hot ones we should visit. Back then, we, and Yahoo, thought the web was a medium, like TV, that we experienced together. Yahoo never quite broke out of that thinking. It still treats its site as a destination we have to go to with walls around it to keep us in. It just introduced a new homepage to some fanfare. Homepages are so 1999. . . .
So, let Yahoo and Microsoft celebrate their deal. Yahoo doesn’t have as much to celebrate. It turned down acquisition offers and now it gets no cash from Microsoft. And it is surrendering its earliest competence to a competitor. Microsoft has more cause to grin. It got Yahoo’s search traffic for no cash and doesn’t have to manage the rest of the old beast.
And Google? One wonders whether it notices beyond that irritating poking at its shins. It’s too busy trying to conquer what comes next.
The John Henry fight of man v. algorithm
I interviewed Josh Cohen, product manager for Google News, this week for the Guardian MediaTalkUSA podcast (out early next week) and asked him how many clicks to news sources Google News causes. The answer: a billion.
And then I saw this PaidContent report on URL-shortener Bit.ly thinking of offering a breaking news service. That doesn’t seem so crazy when you hear how many clicks it causes a month. The answer: a billion.
It so happens I just wrote this in my Media Guardian column, coming out Monday, about the Microsoft-Yahoo search lashup:
Oh, search still matters. But it is beginning to matter a little less. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson recently pointed out that 14% of traffic to his blog, avc.com, comes from Google, down from 29% the year before. Wilson argues that the difference is Twitter—that is, links from people over algorithms. (Note that Wilson is a Twitter investor.)
Now I’m hardly saying that Google is being overrun by the power of mankind. Nor will I argue that every link Bit.ly sends to is news – except more of it is than news organizations would admit if they were wise enough to expand the definition of news to the hyperspecific, a word a commenter below suggested I start using instead of hyperlocal. Your friend’s concert photos are news to him and you. Note also that Bit.ly isn’t the only source of human-powered live links; there’s the rest of Twitter and its other clients, not to mention Facebook and fresh blogging.
But I do think it’s significant that given the platform to collect the power of links by people, it can quickly match the power of the algorithm. I also think there’s even more power in bringing the two together.
What Google Would Do
Is Google’s OS the end of the OS – the long-predicted moment when Google and the web take over the PC? Or is it merely the disruptive OS throwing marbles on the floor for Microsoft and to some extent Apple and the software industry? Or will it be a platform and boon for app developers and PC makers and cloud companies? Or all of the above? Yes.
One may try to parse the motives and implications of the move like Latin haiku, but I think it’s simple; it usually is with Google: It saw an opportunity to serve the end user and took it. The more such opportunities it grabs, the more benefit it brings to more people, the more money it makes. Maps, Docs, Reader, Android, book search, translation tools, GoogleNews are all that. Some attempts don’t stick to the wall; some frontiers remain (it has not won in the social web, the live web, the deep web, and the local web); some things Google has to buy; some still don’t have a clear business model. All have competitors; none is a monopoly, though search and advertising appear that way to some.
How does Google win? Its products are generally but not always better and cheaper (read: free) because Google’s real secret is that it understands the economics of the internet and competed aggressively not against technology and internet companies but instead it competed for advertisers, selling performance over scarcity. The more Google serves end users – and the more it learns about them – the more opportunities it has. These are the economics of free.
I know the question of whether Google is too big will be raised when I appear on Brian Lehrer’s show today (at 11a ET) with Siva Vaidhyanathan. That’s the question Lehrer asked Eric Schmidt at the Aspen Ideas Festival:
“You’ll be surprised that my answer is no,” Schmidt responded. “Would you prefer the government running innovative companies?” No surprise that I agree with Schmidt. Lehrer’s point is that banks needed regulation and that information is becoming as important as money (well, he didn’t go that far). But I say government did regulate banks and AIG and did a horrid job of it. And look at the storm to regulate and break up Microsoft, which is no longer a threat but suddenly a victim. Heh. For that matter, look at what the market did to the oligopoly of Detroit and what Detroit did to itself. Clear Channel, Tribune Company, McClatchy – those are examples in media alone. Big has a way of tumbling of its own weight.
In any case, who’s to say what’s too big? We have a cultural problem of admiring big and then hating big; we want you to grow and then we want to cut you down to size. But this notion of being too big is arbitrary, ultimately meaningless if externally defined.
In this new economy, it may be that Google isn’t yet big enough, that it hasn’t brought its services and innovation – and goad to others to innovate – to enough corners of the internet. We will benefit from there being another operating system that opens up the applications and services to invention, breaking the Microsoft (and Apple) duopoly. We will end up getting cheaper applications and more choice among them. We will end up being able to use cheaper machines because our stuff will be in the cloud.
Yes, Google still has room to grow and there’s more benefit we have to gain. I’ll go farther: Google isn’t yet big enough.
: ALSO: Mashable’s questions about the Chrome OS.
: Gigaom’s good analysis of the news:
Today Google went wild and announced its plans to create the Chrome operating system, which it says will be designed to run on netbooks. But it’s really an attempt to keep Google relevant as an advertising powerhouse as consumers begin spending more time playing with web-connected apps than the web itself. It’s the search giant’s reaction to a wholesale change in computing driven by ubiquitous wireless access and mobility. The Chrome OS is another step in allowing Google to create what we’ve called the OS for advertising — an ad platform that extends across all devices and all screens.
Eric Schmidt on the new world
Here’s video from the Aspen Ideas Festival responding to my question about what follows the industrial age. It’s much better than my limited report on it below:
More of Kai Ryssdal’s very good interview with Schmidt here.
Google on Google
At the Aspen Ideas Festival, I got up to a mic to ask Eric Schmidt a question. No, it wasn’t, “what would Google do?” I wanted his reaction to a notion I’ve talked about here that has crystallized since I wrote the book: that we are going through something more than a financial crisis and more profound and permanent than a recession. We are shifting from the industrial era – and the age of mass production, distribution, marketing, and media – to what follows, a society built on knowledge and abundance. We are seeing the collapse of the auto, banking, and newspaper industries and large swaths of the the rest of media, retail, real estate, and others to follow. We’re not going to go back; the change is bigger and more fundamental than that. “Did I go too far?” I asked.
“Yes,” Schmidt said. “But you’re good at that.” He had been asked earlier how he felt about people constantly asking what Google could and would do about this problem or that. At that moment, he pointed to me and said that What Would Google Do? did that; it took the Google model and extended it. If Google is a metaphor for thinking differently, I am happy to be it,” he said and then demurred, “Google is a simple company.”
Then Schmidt reacted to my question and this is what’s fascinating to me: He said he wished I were right. He said that too much of our resource, people, government help and attention, measurement go to the legacy players, the big, old companies. He wishes that weren’t the case. He wants that change but fears we will return to old reflex. Innovation, he said, happens at small start-ups but they don’t get the resource and attention.
I asked whether Google could be Google only because it was new. He said it was because it worked in the open internet.
He told about being an engineer before Google and seeing whole businesses start because of a regulatory porthole in telecom called the T-1, the 1.5 meg line that wasn’t regulated like the rest of communication. If that ceiling hadn’t been there, he argued, our development of digital would have sped ahead by five years.
So I’m thinking about that: My view of the coming world order may be more a manifesto than a prediction. Hmmmm.
Here are some of my tweets and notes from Schmidt’s Q&A:
* Asked how he reacted on THAT day in September, Schmidt says, “I was scared.” Google took its cash out of banks to sovereign nations’ currencies
* He says he still doesn’t understand how we got into the financial mess: “the failure of information that got us to this point.”
* On recovery: “We’re on schedule. Because the people who got us into this told us that.”
* He reminds US that Google was not part of finance. “Had we been doing it we might have been measuring where all the money was.”
* “We already had our bubble… We had a great time. Next time, I’m going to sell at the peak.” He’s doing great stand-up.
* Asked whether we can innovate out of a recession, Schmidt said “recessions end on their own & politicians love to take credit.”
* Schmidt says the ups and downs will be amplified because there is more information.
* “You do not want the government to own your company… In many cases, they will turn out to be jobs programs.”
* He says simply that he hopes people will more likely say this (house inflation, Iceland’s economy) just “doesn’t make sense”
* Q: You guys are everywhere. Schmidt: “That is our goal.”
* “I learned awhile ago that the right way to run human systems is transparency.” Problems came from information hiding.
* Brian Lehrer asks schmidt where Google is so bit it needs to be regulated as a public utility. A: “no”
* I don’t know how to solve newspapers generic problem. He says they are working on products in this arena. (No more details.)
* “The internet is a great friend to small businesses.” He says Google does not favor big businesses and big businesses don’t like that. [I say: See news.]
* Asked abot Froogle, he says, “Why did you remind me.” Why didn’t it work? “It didin’t work because it just didn’t work. We celebrate our failure in the company because we want people to take risks.” [Me: There's the beta corporation.]
* “We love advertising.” 97 percent of Google’s revenue is advertising. “No, we love advertising revenue.” He said his board is looking for more legs to the stool and Schmidt says they do have other streams coming.
China blinks
I said in What Would Google Do? – and argued the point in a talk at Google in Washington – that Google and other technology companies have more influence than they know – and should use it – in protecting free speech and pressuring censorious governments. I see evidence of the strategy working – or hope I see it – in China’s decision today to delay its noxious Green Dam requirement for all PCs sold there. Government and companies put pressure on; China blinked.
Yahoo’s new CEO, Carol Bartz, said in July that it’s not her job to fix governments. But neither is it a company’s job to enable tyrannical governments in their tyranny. Technology companies from Cisco to Nokia to Siemens that have provided technology to enable censorship and tracking, and companies from Yahoo to Google that have handed over information about users to governments that use it to oppress citizens should be ashamed. And we need to shame them. We need to give them cover by demanding behavior that is not and does not support evil.
In a digital age, censoring the internet, stopping citizens from connecting with each other, and using the internet to spy on and then oppress citizens is evil. We shame companies that helped enable fascist regimes in the ’30s and apartheid in the last century. Is it time for technology boycotts? I’m not sure. But it is time for the discussion.
