Category Archives: Google

Nexus vs iPhone is a skirmish, not the real war

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This morning’s Observer column.

Despite their tender years, the boys who run Google have consistently shown a good grasp of military strategy, the first law of which is always to decline combat on territory dominated by your enemy and fight only on ground where you have the advantage. That’s why for years Google avoided getting into the PC operating system market – Microsoft’s fiefdom – and concentrated instead on search and networked services, where it was overwhelmingly dominant.

This also explains its mobile phone strategy. They recognise that the functional elegance of the iPhone comes from having total control of both the hardware and its software. This kind of integrated mastery, which is Apple’s stock-in-trade, would be difficult to acquire quickly, even for a company as smart as Google…

LATER: I was pondering writing a post expanding the claim in my column about why the iPhone is currently the superior, but I find that Dave Winer has done a much better job than I could. As usual.

Google adds real-time search to its results page

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From VentureBeat.

Google’s results are about to speed up, with what the company says is “the first time ever any search engine has integrated the real-time web into the results page.”

Basically, when users search for something, the most recent news articles and posts on sites like Twitter will be immediately into your results, and those results will be updated immediately as new articles and tweets appear. Google executives are on-stage in Mountain View, Calif. describing the product right now, and while they haven’t offered a comprehensive description of everything that’s included in these results, they did offer a few examples and details:

* If you do a search for “Obama,” you can see the latest news articles and tweets, and as you look at the page, more updates are added as they are published.

* Google has already added time filters to its different search options, so you can just see results from the past day or hour. Now it’s adding an option called “latest,” highlighting these real-time results, as well as an “update” view showing each addition to the search results as it’s published.

* Google will include public updates from Facebook and MySpace users as well, through just-announced partnerships with both companies. [Update: The Facebook deal is limited to Facebook Pages and does not include user profiles.]

* These real-time results will be available on Android phones and iPhones as well.

Google says that to make this happen, it developed “dozens of new technologies” …, such as a language model that can recognize which updates contain new information, and which are just “weather buoys” automatically repeating information posted by others.

Google’s exclusive new operating system

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Here’s an interesting angle on Google’s plan for its cloud-based operating system.

Google’s Chrome OS is a great idea. Put as much as possible into the cloud, and keep the physical device as a “thin client” to access this functionality. However, this great dependence on Internet connectivity has left the OS virtually useless for the vast majority of the world population, especially those who would have benefited the most from a low-cost, lightweight computer.

Now that a $100 computer is actually starting to look plausible, it’s ironic that those in true need of one won’t be able to use it. It will remain a luxury item, a secondary computer to those better off.

An even bleaker outlook: broadband

The numbers so far have been about Internet access, any kind, but to properly use a Web OS like the Chrome OS, you really need a broadband connection. This disqualifies an even larger percentage of the population. The mere thought of downloading and uploading documents and other data over an old dial-up connection makes us shiver.

So how common is broadband? Not as common as you might expect. For example, in the United States, 74.1% of the population has Internet access, but as of 2008, only 57% were accessing the Internet over a broadband connection. You could say that this makes Chrome OS unusable to 43% of the US population…

Thanks to Charles Arthur for passing on the link. Actually, there are time when I think that Chrome OS might not be too hot over my BT rural “broadband” DSL either.

Google: the latest control-freak on the block

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This morning’s Observer column.

A basic principle of warfare is never to fight on terrain chosen — or dominated — by your enemy. This principle seemed to explain why, as Google rose to challenge Microsoft as the world’s most powerful technology company, the one market it eschewed was that for operating systems. That territory was dominated by Bill Gates & Co and so Google concentrated on building dominance in areas where Microsoft was feeble or non-existent: search, cloud computing, web applications, advertising. It all seemed so sensible.

But then last July, Google gave notice that it had changed tack by revealing it was working on a radical new operating system called Chrome OS. Just over a week ago, the product was officially launched at the company’s Californian HQ, which left the technology community intrigued and puzzled, and the mainstream media salivating over the prospect of a head-to-head battle between Google and Microsoft…

Inside the mind of the Digger?

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Unless you’ve been vacationing on Mars you will know that Rupert Murdoch has been threatening to ban Google from indexing News Corporation websites. This proposition seems so bizarre that it’s had people wondering whether the Digger might be losing his marbles. There are (as I’ve observed before) two schools of thought:

1. He is losing his marbles.

2. He knows something that the rest of us don’t. Support for this view comes from people’s respect for his track record of making bold, risky decisions which have paid off handsomely. On the other hand, his record isn’t entirely unblemished when it comes to Cyberspace. This will be his third foray into Cyberspace, and his first two were not exactly unqualified successes. And even his purchase of MySpace, once hailed as an act of genius, is beginning to look tarnished in the light of Facebook’s rise. So let’s not get carried away by delusions of the Digger’s omniscience.

Kara Swisher is the latest commentator to attempt to fathom the Digger’s mind. In this post, she offers no fewer than five possible interpretations. Here’s a summary:

1. Murdoch really means it.

the increasing money being made by Google, even as their revenue has suffered, has developed into a growing problem.

Which is simply this: There is a lot more money to be made in searching for content than in making content.

This realization has to shake content czars like Murdoch to the core, but it is indeed the situation they find themselves in.

Murdoch makes a fair point in that journalism costs money to make and it used to have a solid economic system under it until Google and others on the Web disaggregated it wholly.

Thus, online aggregators become “tapeworms,” as The Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson quipped.

2. Murdoch really means to create a lot of confusion, in order to shake down Google.

Well, it would not be the first time Murdoch and many others of his ilk have used public sharp elbows and saber-rattling to get what they want.

Except in this case, the algorithm experts over at Google know precisely–down to the tenth decimal–how much linking to News Corp. makes for them.

And it is not much, especially when looking at the vast sea of data Google serves up.

Its money-making is widely dissipated, from searches for vacation information to mapping to car-buying to health. While news-finding definitely is part of the mix, it is not at the center of the Borg.

3. Murdoch really means to create a lot of confusion, in order to shake down Microsoft.

4. A deal will be made.

My not-too-surprising prediction is that in the end, News Corp. and others will probably strike some kind of lesser deal with Microsoft – although it will tout the heck out of it – while taking some of its content behind a pay wall and thereby de-indexing it from Google.

5. The truth is out there.

In perhaps his most strident television interview, with his Sky News Australia service (which you can see below–oh, the irony–on Google’s YouTube), Murdoch said about those who use Google to find News Corp. content:

“They don’t suddenly become loyal readers of our content. We’d rather have fewer people coming to our Web site but paying.”

That really is the honest truth in all this hubbub: Murdoch and other publishers have to find a way to get a some pool of dedicated online readers to pay enough to be able to then provide them with content that will keep them coming back for more.

That’s a business that Google truly cannot help or hinder, really.

In a nutshell: something will happen but we don’t know what.

Google’s new Operating System explained

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Very neat exposition. Just the right number of half-truths.

Google’s now saying that Chrome will be appearing on netbooks in the latter half of 2010. It’ll make waves.

UPDATE: Technology Review has a useful outline of the OS. It contains this interesting snippet:

The operating system won’t be available for download, however. Because of its tight integration between software and hardware, users will have to buy a Chrome device from one of Google’s partners in order to use it. Google plans to give partners strict hardware requirements for the devices, specifying particular wireless cards and other components.

The code is, however, open source and anyone can run it on a virtual machine.

The New York Times take on it is that this is a direct challenge to Microsoft:

“Hundreds of millions of users are living on the cloud,” said Sundar Pichai, a vice president for product management at Google in charge of Chrome. Every program that users enjoy on their PCs today, Mr. Pichai said, will soon be available as a Web application. “The trend is very, very clear,” he said.

While Microsoft and others say they believe that cloud-based programs will coexist with traditional PC software, Google has often said that Web applications will replace all desktop software, another area that Microsoft dominates. Machines running the Chrome operating system, which initially will be limited to lightweight, portable computers known as netbooks, will not run any desktop applications other than the Chrome browser.

But even Mr. Pichai said that devices on the Chrome operating system were likely to be used, at least at first, as a complement to users’ more powerful computers at home.

Analysts said that the Chrome operating system could pose a challenge to Microsoft over the long term but said that Microsoft was not sitting still.

In truth, this isn’t a paradigm shift. That happened ages ago with things like Hotmail and Gmail and Google Docs as the network supplanted the PC as the computer. The Chrome OS is just the first major operating system product built on the shift.

Fantasy land: or the myth of the Digger’s omniscience

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Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post about the

“swine flu of stupidity spreading about the Murdoch meme of blocking Google from indexing a site’s content (to which Google always replies that you’ve always been able to do that with robots.txt – so go ahead if you want). I love that The Reach Group (TRG), a German consulting company, has quantified just how damaging that would be to Google: hardly at all.”

The analysis is interesting — see Jeff’s post for the details. He’s also done a useful job of summarising some of the dafter ideas sparked by commentators’ awe of Rupert Murdoch. Sample:

Jason Calicanis fantasizes about Microsoft paying The New York Times to leave Google’s index for Bing. Let me explain why that would never happen. 1. The Times is not stupid. 2. Times subsidiary About.com – the only bright spot these days in the NYTimesCo’s P&L – gets 80% of its traffic and 50% of its revenue from Google. 3. See rule No. 1.

Michael Arrington then joined in the fantasy saying that News Corp. could change the balance by shifting to Bing, but ends his post with his own reality check: MySpace – increasingly a disaster in News Corp’s P&L – is attempting to negotiate its $300 million deal with Google.

Microsoft can suck up to European publishers all it wants – even adopting their ACAP “standard,” which no one in the search industry is saluting because, as Google often points out, it addresses the desires only of a small proportion of sites and it would end up aiding spammers – but it won’t make a damned bit of difference.

As Erick Schonfeld reports, also on TechCrunch, if WSJ.com turned off Google it would lose 25% of its web traffic. He quotes Hitwise, which says 15% comes from Google search, 12% from Google News – and 7% from Drudge (aggregator), and 2% from Real Clear Politics (aggregator).

It’s like I said:

The prevailing sentiment however can be summed up as a paradox: nobody thinks that a “screw-you-Google” strategy makes sense, but they assume that Murdoch knows something they don’t, and that the strategy will make sense when all is revealed. In that way, the Digger is rather like Warren Buffett: his past investment record is so good that people are wary of questioning his judgment.

Microsoft to fund ACAP development?

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The search by newspaper publishers for DRM-for-papers continues. ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) is currently their Great White Hope. This report from TechCrunch suggests that Microsoft might be getting in on the act.

Our sources say Microsoft has pledged to help fund research and engineering into ACAP to the tune of about will put £100,000. This is the more granular version of the robots.txt protocol which has been proposed by publishers to enable them to have a more sophisticated response to search engine crawlers. However, we understand that Microsoft won’t be involved in developing the protocol, just the financial funding.

For years, Google has characterised the debate about search engines as “you are either in our index or not in it, there is no half-way house.” But the Automated Content Access Protocol ”ACAP” proposes a far more layered response, allowing full access or just access to some content of a site. Unsurprisingly, it’s been developed by a consortium of the World Association of Newspapers, European Publishers Council and International Publishers Association. Proposed in 2006, it has been criticised as being biased towards publishers rather than search engines, specifically Google, and few non-ACAP members have adopted the protocol. Some call it the “DRM of newspaper web sites”. That said some 1,600 traditional publishers have signed up to using ACAP.

But if Bing starts to play ball with ACAP, this could change the game. Suddenly newspapers will have a stick, and a heavyweight enforcer in the shape of Bing, with which to beat Google. Google would have a choice – either recognise the ACAP protocol in order to get some level of access to newspaper sites, or just ignore it…