Category Archives: Google

The gospel according to Orlowski

Posted on by

From Spiked-Online.

Google has two business strategies. One strategy is to ensure that the internet’s pipelines, both wired and wireless, can’t make money. It has lobbied for a ‘neutral’ internet, and sought to write the first technical regulations ever imposed on the internet – the first rulebook for operators. Robbing the retail networks (in the jargon, ‘access networks’, or ISPs) of the ability to generate value allows Google to concentrate the value instead in its vast data centres. It’s a peculiarly inefficient way of distributing bits, and precludes all kind of clever network innovation – but it’s the one that Google prefers. It’s where it has placed its bets.

The other strategy, more noticeable, helps ensure the destruction of the value of copyright. This permits Google to become, by default, the world’s royalty collection society, the only aggregator of digital value. As with internet advertising today, Google would set the royalty rates, weakening the ability of creators to negotiate collectively for better rates, as they do today. Newspapers, publishers and other media companies have only belatedly begun to come to terms with Google’s take-no-prisoners approach. For example, it took EMI Publishing six months to realise that Google had digitised its valuable sheet music collection, as part of its Google Books settlement, without asking. There are entire industries that don’t realise they’re in Google’s crossfire, until they’ve been shot, and the body carried from the battlefield.

Is Google Wave getting Buzzed?

Posted on by

That’s the question being asked by by Tom Krazit.

If Google Wave eventually fails to live up to the promise and hype that accompanied its launch at Google I/O in May 2009, consider its demise an inside job.

Arguably one of Google’s biggest announcements of last year, Google Wave appears to be an afterthought among the tech trendsetters after the launch of Google Buzz in early February. Privacy concerns mostly laid to rest, Google Buzz is actually doing much of what Google Wave promised: collaborative discussion, media sharing, and social networking within an e-mail-like framework.

So what are Google customers and users to do with two Web communication platforms? Is Google Buzz simply a stepping stone to Google Wave, as TechCrunch suggested at its launch? Or is it something more, something designed to bypass its more powerful yet complicated corporate sibling?

Don’t expect a direct answer from Google. In all fairness, that’s because it simply doesn’t know: with Wave and Buzz, Google is essentially willing to let the best idea win.

“At the end of the day, we’ll find out what users want,” said Lars Rasmussen, engineering manager for the Wave project. “If we required every product we launched not to have any overlapping functionality, that would dramatically slow down our innovation.”

So: we’ll find out in due course. Personally I’m not convinced that users have a need for either Wave or Buzz.

Google discovers that phones are hard-ware

Posted on by

From Good Morning Silicon Valley:

This morning, analytics outfit Flurry, which gets a good handle on handset use through app stats, delivered its estimate of Nexus One sales in the phone’s first 74 days, and the news was not good. The 74-day milestone was used because that’s how long it took the first model of Apple’s iPhone to sell one million units. Flurry’s calculation of Nexus One sales over a similar stretch — 135,000 units. The sorry showing has nothing to do with overall enthusiasm for Google’s Android mobile OS; in its first 74 days, Motorola’s Droid sales hit 1.05 million units, a tad better than the original iPhone. Because of assorted market variables, the numbers aren’t directly comparable, but they do provide a general sense of things. And what the numbers would seem to be telling Google is that without the marketing muscle and consumer convenience that come with selling a phone through a major carrier, even a technically impressive piece of hardware is going to have a rough go of it. Google will have to hope things turn around once the Nexus One becomes available on the Verizon network this spring.

And, to add insult to injury, Google’s discovered that its application to trademark ‘Nexus’ has been rejected. Someone else got there first. Google will appeal. Lots of lucrative work for m’learned friends ahead.

Tim Bray: Now A No-Evil Zone

Posted on by

Tim Bray has jumped ship — from Oracle to Google. And he’s there to work on Android and compete with Apple.

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.

The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.

Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.

I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.

Hooray! Interesting times ahead. And he’s a photographer too.

Libraries and the digital record

Posted on by

Jonathan Zittrain from the Berkman Center at Harvard gave this riveting lecture at Duke University on March 3. It’s quite long — an hour and a quarter — so you need to allocate some serious time to it, but IMHO it’s worth it. It starts slowly as he lays out an analytical framework that, at first sight, seems to have little to do with libraries, but about 27 minutes in to the presentation he really hits his stride. For anyone interested in the cultural responsibilities of libraries in a digital era, this is eye-opening stuff becasue it gives some concrete examples of cases where libraries will need to assume really serious responsibilities as curators of the digital record, not just in terms of preservation, but also in defence of historical accuracy.

Subverting Gmail’s adstream

Posted on by

Well, well. Just came on this exciting report.

Cambridge UK startup Rapportive has released a Firefox and Chrome extension that will replace the ads in your Gmail with photos, biographic data and social media links, including a live display of recent Tweets, for whoever you're corresponding with by email. It’s fantastic and takes about 2 minutes to set up.

Sounds good, eh? But

You don’t need to give Rapportive your Gmail credentials, the service asks you to login via secure Google Federated Login, or OpenID. The startup doesn’t have access to your password, but it does access the contents of your email – that’s how it builds a service for you to use. Any browser extension has access to everything you do on the web, but I expect some people will feel a little nervous about installing a webmail related extension from a small company. I don’t think that concern is warranted enough to justify missing out on this awesome service.

Oh yeah?

Only the paranoid survive

Posted on by

Interesting insight from a recent speech given in Dublin by Google’s European sales chief.

Google believes that in three years or so desktops will give way to mobile as the primary screen from which most people will consume information and entertainment. That’s according to Google Europe boss John Herlihy who said that smart phones enhance Google’s mission to make information universal.

Speaking at the Digital Landscapes conference at UCD, Herlihy said that the cloud-computing opportunity will make sure that every mobile device will be capable of doing rapid-scale applications.

“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,” Herlihy told a baffled audience, echoing comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the recent GSM Association Mobile World Congress 2010 that everything the company will do going forward will be via a mobile lens, centring on the cloud, computing and connectivity.

“Mobile makes the world’s information universally accessible. Because there’s more information and because it will be hard to sift through it all, that’s why search will become more and more important. This will create new opportunities for new entrepreneurs to create new business models – ubiquity first, revenue later.”

In fact, the disruptive effect that Sergey Brin and Larry Page had on the internet when they were maxing out credit cards in 1998 to buy servers to build their search engine haunts Google to this day, Herlihy said.

“The fear is the next Sergey and Larry will come up with a disruptive technology or service that will eliminate the need for Google. That spurs us on to deliver the best quality return on investment to advertisers in an open and transparent partnership that works for them.

“There is a tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurs to end the need for Google. It’s our challenge not to let that happen by continuing to drive innovation and value.”

Apple goes after Android

Posted on by

Rather than take on Google directly, Apple has sued HTC, the manufacturer which makes most of the handsets currently running the Android operating system. But to the detached observer, it’s clear what the real target is. Here’s GMSV’s take on it:

Although not named in Apple’s suits accusing HTC of multiple violations of iPhone-related patents, Google made a point Tuesday of publicly declaring its support for the company that makes many of the most popular Android-based smartphones, including the Google-branded Nexus One. “We are not a party to this lawsuit,” a spokesman told TechCrunch. “However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us to develop it.” Unless Google can come up with a reason to turn loose its own legal hounds in a counterattack against Apple, however, that support, whatever form it takes, will be coming from the sidelines. In an effort clearly aimed at halting the Android advance, Apple avoided tangling with the search sovereign mano a mano and instead hit the HTC flank, opening the possibility of winning a U.S. International Trade Commission injunction sealing the border against any HTC phones found to be infringing.

Judging by HTC’s latest statement regarding the action, it may already have gotten some advice from Google on framing its position in the court of public opinion. In advising stockholders that it doesn’t expect the Apple suits to have any short-term material impact or affect Q1 guidance, HTC flew the freedom-of-choice banner, saying, “HTC believes that consumer choice is a key component to success in the smartphone industry and this is best achieved through multiple suppliers providing a variety of mobile experiences. HTC has focused on offering its customers a uniquely-HTC experience through HTC Sense and its broad portfolio of smartphones.”

Where things go from here is anyone’s guess — ITC action, countersuits and amended complaints, out of court settlement, royalties, IP sharing, full review of the patents themselves. But as a first-strike FUD missile, Apple’s litigation seems to be doing its job right now.

What it suggests to me is that Android is beginning to bite, in the sense that Apple thinks it may turn out to pose a strategic threat to the iPhone/iPad market.

The Google Three

Posted on by

This morning”s Observer column about the Italian convictions handed out to three Googlers.

In the case of the Google Three, however, it’s likely that they will be vindicated because even if the Italian appeal fails, there is always the possibility of recourse to the European Court in Strasbourg, which will take the view that European Union law, as currently drafted, appears to give hosting providers a safe harbour from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The downside of this, of course, is that Google will have to be much more responsive to complaints, which will make it much easier to have videos taken down because the prudent course will always be to “take down first and ask questions later”.

The glory days of YouTube may be coming to an end. And Silvio Berlusconi remains at large.

The Google problem

Posted on by

Christopher Caldwell is a terrific columnist. His FT essay this week — a meditation on the implications of the complaints lodged with the EU Commission this week by e-Justice, Foundem and Ciao! — is a model of thoughtful analysis, and a good reminder of why the weekend FT is such a good buy.

There is either a big problem with Google or there is none at all. If you believe that Google is engaged in open competition, many of the complaints against it look like sour grapes. The Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace, a Microsoft-funded study group, issued a white paper last summer on “Openness and the Internet” that, in one sense, is little more than a grab-bag of gripes. The paper notes that Google “operates in a manner that shields it from scrutiny by the other actors” (as if other businesses do not), that it is hard to gather data on Google advertising campaigns and to make them interoperable with other search engines (which is an inconvenience for Google’s advertisers but not a duty for Google), and that Google’s pricing policies are opaque (ditto). On the other hand, any of these failings under monopoly conditions would be a serious problem.

Google insists that its searches are neutral both in appearance and fact. Its “natural searches” – the ones that match up searchers with the sites they will most likely want to visit – are done through an “algorithm” that measures hundreds of variables, with no human intervention once the algorithm has been designed. But Google also carries “sponsored links” – advertisements – which appear alongside the natural-search results. Advertisers bid to be listed by Google any time a given word or phrase is searched for. And here the business gets more subjective. Google has an interest in making web-surfing pleasant and convenient. It gives “quality scores” – rankings based on attractiveness, ease of use and percentage of original content – to its bidders. So a website with a low “quality score” must bid more to be included. The nub of Foundem’s complaint is that its quality scores inexplicably fell, driving its cost per hit from 5p to £5. Was this because it is also a Google competitor?

Worth reading in full. I’ve written before that Google is “the next Microsoft” in the sense that it’s going to be the anti-trust problem of the next decade. But the issues that it raises will be much more subtle and complex than anything we had with Bill Gates & Co.