Category Archives: Google

So will Google’s Chromebook transform how we think about computers?

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My Observer piece about the forthcoming Google netbook.

On 15 June, Google will officially take the next step on its road to global domination. From that day onwards, online shoppers will be able to buy the Google Chromebook, a device that the search giant hopes will change the way we think about computers – and in the process rain on the parades of Apple and Microsoft.

On the face of it, the Chromebook seems an unlikely game-changer. Its first two manifestations – from electronics giants Samsung and Acer – look like any old netbook: thin (0.79in) clamshell design, 12.1in screen, standard-sized keyboard, trackpad. At 3.2lb, it’s not particularly light. The claimed battery life (8.5 hours for the Samsung version) is pretty good, but otherwise the Google machine looks rather conventional.

The surprises start when you hit the on button…

Copyright, copywrongs and Professor Hargreaves

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Today’s Observer column.

Watching British politicians engage with technology companies is a bit like listening to maiden aunts wondering if they would look better in thongs. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, to name just two such aunts, fantasised that Microsoft was cool, and spent years trying to associate themselves (and New Labour) with Bill Gates – even going to the lengths of making the Microsoft boss an honorary knight. Then we had the equally ludicrous spectacle of Cameron and co believing that Google is cool, which is why its CEO, Eric Schmidt – who for these purposes is the Google Guys’ representative on Earth – was an honoured guest at Cameron’s first party conference as leader. Given that, it’s only a matter of time before Ed Miliband discovers that Facebook is the new cool. And so it will go on.

Cameron’s worship of Google did, however, have one tangible result. Mortified by the Google Guys' assertion that the UK’s intellectual property regime would have made it impossible to launch their company in the UK, he decided to commission an inquiry into said regime under the chairmanship of Professor Ian Hargreaves.

Privacy in the networked universe

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From a comment piece by me in today’s Observer.

Recent events in the high court suggest that we now have two parallel media universes.

In one – Universe A – we find tightly knit groups of newspaper editors and expensive lawyers trying to persuade a judge that details of the sexual relations between sundry celebrities and a cast of characters once memorably characterised by a Glasgow lawyer as “hoors, pimps and comic singers” should (or should not) be published in the public prints.

If the judge sides with the celebs, then he or she can grant an injunction forbidding publication. But because news of an injunction invariably piques public interest (no smoke without fire and all that), an extra legal facility has become popular — the super-injunction, which prevents publication of news that an injunction has been granted, thereby ensuring not only that Joe Public knows nothing of the aforementioned cavortings, but also that he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know.

In the old days, this system worked a treat for the simple reason that Universe A was hermetically sealed. If a judge granted the requisite injunctions, then nobody outside the magic circle knew anything.

But those days are gone. Universe A is no longer hermetically sealed.

It now leaks into Universe B, which is the networked ecosystem powered by the internet. And once news of an injunction gets on to the net, then effectively the whole expensive charade of Universe A counts for nought. A few minutes’ googling or twittering is usually enough to find out what’s going on.

This raises interesting moral dilemmas for Joe Public…

And now: the Android spyPhone

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From yesterday’s Guardian:

Smartphones running Google’s Android software collect data about the user’s movements in almost exactly the same way as the iPhone, according to an examination of files they contain. The discovery, made by a Swedish researcher, comes as the Democratic senator Al Franken has written to Apple’s chief executive Steve Jobs demanding to know why iPhones keep a secret file recording the location of their users as they move around, as the Guardian revealed this week. Magnus Eriksson, a Swedish programmer, has shown that Android phones – now the bestselling smartphones – do the same, though for a shorter period. According to files discovered by Eriksson, Android devices keep a record of the locations and unique IDs of the last 50 mobile masts that it has communicated with, and the last 200 Wi-Fi networks that it has “seen”. These are overwritten, oldest first, when the relevant list is full. It is not yet known whether the lists are sent to Google. That differs from Apple, where the data is stored for up to a year.

Larry Page: saying FU to Wall Street

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Refreshing rant by Henry Blodget.

Wall Street has reacted to the first quarter in the Page regime by tossing the stock overboard. Larry Page is spending way too much, Wall Street says. Larry Page isn’t communicating well enough. Larry Page couldn’t even be bothered to spend more than a couple of minutes on the earnings call with Wall Street last night. So to hell with him!

Lost under the outrage, of course, is that Larry Page may be doing exactly the right thing: Focusing on Google and Google’s products and users, instead of Wall Street.

Wall Street loves to be made to feel that there is nothing that matters more to a CEO than Wall Street. But Wall Street’s focus is relentlessly short-term: Wall Street cares about this quarter and next quarter, not the next 10 years. And although short-term performance certainly provides an indication about where a company is headed, for the long-term value of the company itself, it’s nearly irrelevant.

If Google is to wrest back the mantle of innovation leadership from Apple and Facebook, it needs to focus on the long term. It needs to revitalize the culture of innovation that defined the company in the beginning. It needs to make big, bold bets that cost a lot of money. And it needs to address its biggest weaknesses. In short, it needs to do exactly what Larry Page and Sergey Brin said Google would do when it went public seven years go: Focus on the long-term, not the short term, and make decisions that won’t make short-term investors happy.

Yep. All of which confirms the wisdom of the decision the Google boys made before their IPO — to have two kinds of share, much as the Sulzbergers set up the stock structure of the NY Times. The founders control the shares which decide the issues; and, in the end, Wall Street can get stuffed.

Google and the coming war

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Fascinating — and perceptive — Forbes column by Ben Horowitz, the big-time venture capitalist, on what the changes at the top of Google really signify.

Recently, Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO of Google and founder Larry Page took over. Much of the news coverage focused on Page’s ability to be the “face of Google” as Page is far more shy and introverted than the gregarious and articulate Schmidt. While an interesting issue, this analysis misses the main point. Eric Schmidt was much more than Google’s front man; as Google’s peacetime Chief Executive, he led the greatest technology business expansion in the last ten years. Larry Page, in contrast, seems to have determined that Google is moving into war and he clearly intends to be a wartime CEO. This will be a profound change for Google and the entire high-tech industry.

This is a really interesting piece which, among other things, points out that most management textbooks are written for ‘peacetime’ CEOs. Worth reading in full.

Steven Levy on Google

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Here’s an interesting interview with Steven Levy, who has a new book about Google. Sigh: another one for the ‘must read’ pile.

Amazon’s new Cloud Drive rains on everyone’s parade

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This morning’s Observer column.

“Impetuosity and audacity,” wrote Machiavelli, “often achieve what ordinary means fail to achieve.” If you doubt that, may I propose a visit to the upper echelons of Apple, Google and Sony, where steam might be observed venting from every orifice of senior executives? If you do undertake such a visit, do not under any circumstances mention the word “Amazon”.

The proximate cause of all this corporate spleen is the launch last week of Amazon’s Cloud Drive service. At first sight, it seems straightforward: it looks like a digital locker in which one may for a fee securely store one’s digital assets in the internet ‘cloud’. “Anything digital, securely stored,” runs the blurb, “available anywhere.” The first 5GB of storage is free, with more available at an annual cost of a dollar per gigabyte. Upload files to your "cloud drive", where they are stored online and from where they can be accessed by any device that you own.

So far, so innocuous. It’s not the online storage business that has Apple, Google & Co spitting feathers, but the Amazon CloudPlayer which goes along with the digital locker…

Google booked by judge

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This morning’s Observer column.

Last week, a US judge in Manhattan made a landmark decision. As to what it means, opinions vary. Some see it as arresting the cultural progress that began with the Enlightenment; others are celebrating Judge Denny Chin’s ruling as the blocking of a predatory move by a giant corporation to control access to the world’s cultural heritage. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between…

LATER: Interesting comment by Tim O’Reilly:

I think that when we look back at the history of the e-book market one of the classic business school cases is going to be how stupid it was for publishers to sue Google. Here you have a powerful, monopolistic company, and then you have another company that comes in really as a white knight, and the publishers sued the white knight. And the thing that was wrong about this was that the publishers’ settlement basically made Google into an ineffective competitor to Amazon. It took away all of Google’s strength. It made their model like Amazon’s, in which it had no advantages.

There were some really interesting things that Google could have done like algorithmic pricing. They were talking about taking a much smaller cut of the transaction, building the marketplace in a very different way. They were talking about open standards. Google ideally should have been building a book search engine that searched all e-books where they were and not just on Google’s site. They made mistakes. If the settlement had pushed them in that way it would have been really, really interesting. But it made Google a book retailer, which they aren’t, and now we have one dominant player, and the publishers are going to really come to regret that. Apple may end up being a big player, but it’s hard to tell.

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link.