Two slides from Google’s PowerPoint presentation to analysts caught my attention. In a section about how the company goes about things, Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior VP for Product Development, first put up this picture of how conventional companies work:
The next slide showed the Google Way:
Ah, the delights of hubris.
After the share price drop, Google discovered that Wall Street has to massaged after all. Here’s an interesting transcript of the conference that senior Googlers had with analysts last week. The aim was clearly to reassure them that things are OK, honest. Confirms me in my belief that I’d rather eat flies than run a public company. Imagine having to be nice to these creeps.
Nice piece in the Wall Street Journal by Lee Gomes.
There is a new and insidious threat to the World Wide Web: a slowly rising tide of “original content” on Internet sites that is at best worthless, and at worst possibly even dangerously inaccurate.
I should know; I’ve been writing some of the stuff myself.
Understanding what’s happening requires a lesson in modern Web economics. If there is a topic in the news, people will be searching on it. If you can get those searchers to land on a seemingly authoritative page you’ve set up, you can make money from their arrival. Via ads, for instance.
It’s a wicked world out there. Sigh.
Pithy comment by Dave on Google’s latest (rather feeble) brainwave…
This evening Google launched a totally unremarkable page creator web app. It’s a nice Ajax text editor, with templates, but why isn’t it part of Blogger, or at least connected to Blogger, and where is the feed? The sites have no structure.
Where is the Mind of Google these days? Seems to be back in the mid-90s, re-discovering Geocities.
Give me a ring when there’s at least some rudimentary content management in there.
Score: C.
Hmmm… Just tried to use it. Got a message saying that due to overwhelming demand it wasn’t available right now.
In view of the moral capitulation to Chinese demands, perhaps “Don’t be evil” should be modified to read “Do the lesser evil”?
There’s a wonderfully ironic blast in Good Morning Silicon Valley today about the Chinese censorship issue. Here’s a sample:
Given a choice, representatives of four big tech companies probably wouldn’t be spending the day sitting in front of a congressional panel getting their eyebrows singed by accusations that they consort with torturers. But there they sat today — the crash-test dummies sent by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco to take the hit for their employers’ concessions to repression as the price of doing business in China — as Rep. Tom Lantos, ranking Democrat on the International Relations Committee, unloaded on them: “Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace. I simply don’t understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night.” And Republican Rep. Chris Smith, chairman of the House subcommittee on global human rights, produced a quote that should be engraved on the entrance of every stock exchange: “Cooperation with tyranny should not be embraced for the sake of profits.”
The responses from the witnesses was [sic] familiar: The “lesser evil” argument (Google’s Elliot Schrage: “The requirements of doing business in China include self-censorship — something that runs counter to Google’s most basic values and commitments as a company. … [but Google entered the market believing it] will make a meaningful, though imperfect, contribution to the overall expansion of access to information in China.”) and the “little us” argument (Yahoo’s Michael Callahan: “These issues are larger than any one company, or any one industry.’ … We appeal to the U.S. government to do all it can to help us provide beneficial services to Chinese citizens lawfully and in a way consistent with our shared values.”).
For Rep. Smith, that just doesn’t cut it. “It’s an active partnership with both the disinformation campaign and the secret police, and the secret police in China are among the most brutal on the planet,” he said. “I don’t know if these companies understand that or they’re naive about it, whether they’re witting or unwitting. But it’s been a tragic collaboration. There are people in China being tortured courtesy of these corporations.”
I particularly liked the headline on the piece: “But we’re only giant, powerful tech companies … how could we possibly make a difference?” And the phrase “crash-test dummies”. Must make a note of it. Might come in useful sometime.
Barron’s, the influential US financial publication, seems to think so. Excerpt from an interesting piece:
INVESTORS HAVE BEEN FIXATED on Google the past few weeks, as its shares have tumbled nearly 25% from a peak of $475 — and the fact is, there could be a lot more tumbling ahead. The share price could well be cut in half over the next year as the Internet giant grapples with growing competition from Microsoft and Yahoo!, increased pricing pressures in its online ad sales and mounting concern about what’s known as click fraud.
Barron’s thinks that Google stock is overvalued by at least a factor of two. Reasoning:
To get a sense of what might happen to the stock, we gave one über-bull’s 2006 revenue estimate for Google a 20% haircut, trimmed his projected expenses by 5% (but no further, because bulls greatly underestimate Google’s costs), deducted stock-based compensation and, generously, gave the company credit for the considerable interest income on its cash. The result: Earnings would be 30% lower than the bull’s projection, at $6.28 a share. If the stock were to maintain its current multiple of 41 on those lowered earnings, it would be worth $257. It’s more likely the multiple would shrink to as low as 30, in line with the slower growth. That would make the stock worth $188, versus its recent $360.
Since I don’t own any shares, it’s all theoretical to me. But it goes to show how overheated the Google stock-hype (with some people fantasising about a share price of $2000) could turn out to be.
Ho, ho. News.com report…
Yahoo confirmed on Wednesday that it’s polling some Yahoo Mail users about what they would want in exchange for making Yahoo their primary search engine. The survey was sent to a random sampling representing about 5 percent of its Yahoo Mail users, a Yahoo representative said.
“Yahoo is considering launching a program to reward people who make Yahoo their primary search engine,” the survey says. “Yahoo Mail users will be given early access to this program. You will receive a monthly reward if you make Yahoo your primary search engine. This means that most of the searching you do each month must be on Yahoo Search.”
Users would have to log in or use a search box specifically designed for the program, like “a Yahoo rewards toolbar,” the survey said. It then listed 10 different potential reward options…
Message from Gmail this morning:
Chat with your friends from right inside Gmail. There’s no need to load a separate program or look up new addresses. It’s just one click to chat with the people you already email, as well as anyone on the Google Talk network. And now you can even save and search for chats in your Gmail account.
Nice, properly barbed, piece by Tom Zeller in the New York Times about the way US technology companies are caving in to the Chinese government’s repressive demands.
Western technology companies have only themselves to blame if users in the free world quickly ask when Shi Tao, the journalist whose name Yahoo gave to Chinese authorities and who subsequently was sentenced to a 10-year prison term, will be released. Or that people use what-ifs to ponder the moral limits of saying that local law is local law.
That’s partly because it is only recently that any of the players have made any genuine efforts at transparency in their dealings with China.
Two weeks ago, Google took the bold step of plainly admitting that it was entering the Chinese market with a censored search product, tweaked according to government specifications. Then last week, Microsoft announced new policies that would enable it to honor a government’s demand to shut down a citizen’s blog (as happened five weeks ago with a popular MSN blogger in Beijing) while still keeping the blog visible outside of China.
But these are small victories, said Julien Pain of the group Reporters Without Borders, which tracks Internet censorship in China, not least because the companies “seem now to accept censorship as a given, and have simply decided to be transparent about it.”
Still, to many, it signaled progress.
And yet all four American companies with P.R. baggage in China — Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft and now Google — were no-shows at a hearing last Wednesday of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. At least three of the companies submitted written statements defending their activities in China, but their absence only added to their image problem, as headlines like “Tech Firms Snub Feds” and “Google Stiffs Congressional Caucus” bounced around the blogosphere.
Later in the piece, Zeller ponders the question of whether Google in particular might pay a price (in the West) for its capitulation.
IceRocket is one of several search alternatives listed at NoLuv4Google.org, which is run by a group called Students for a Free Tibet. Clusty.com, a search site developed by several Carnegie Mellon computer scientists, is another. Clusty proudly states that it “never censors search results” or excludes material “that would be objectionable to governments or would be unlawful in unelected, nondemocratic regimes.”
In an e-mail message, Mark Cuban, IceRocket’s founder, put it more bluntly: “IceRocket doesn’t and won’t censor. We index more than one million Chinese-language blogs. No chance we censor or block anything in this lifetime.”
Even David Pinto, who owns the popular — and wholly apolitical — site BaseballMusings.com, has ceased taking income from Google ads. “I was no longer comfortable taking money from them,” he said. That’s the sort of apple-pie protest that American companies can’t ignore.
The House of Representatives Subcommittee on Global Human Rights is going to hold hearings on this interesting topic on February 15. Google & Co will have to show up for this because the commitee has the power to subpoena them.