Is online. Distinctly underwhelming, so far. But it’s early days. And there are all those pesky lawsuits from publishers to be sorted out before anything much happens.
Category Archives: Google
Quote of the day
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Google’s true corporate mission was to organize the world’s wealth, not its information.
John Paczkowski, writing in Good Morning, Silicon Valley about the news that Google’s income increased seven fold over the last year.
Something’s up
Sun Microsystems has announced a link-up with Google.
What’s going to come from this?
Nobody knows — yet. But here’s a quote from the Blog maintained by Sun’s President, Jonathan Schwartz:
Or finally, as I did last week at a keynote, ask the audience which they’d rather give up – their browser, or all the rest of their desktop apps. (Unanimously, they’d all give up the latter without a blink.) All these trends show a slowing upgrade appetite calling into question the power of traditional distribution. In stark contrast to the value of volume, community and participation.
Now, I have been nothing if not tediously repetitive in stating my belief that volume begets value – best demonstrated by the rise of the free software movement (whose volume is derived from its price, its value from innovation, in all forms). The cost of reaching customers, traditionally the most expensive part of building a business, has largely been eliminated – resulting in massive, global participation. Value’s literally everywhere the network travels, on every device it touches (and it’s subsidizing some very interesting ideas.)
But value is returning to the desktop applications, and not simply through Windows Vista. But in the form of applications that are network service platforms. From the obvious, to music sharing clients and development tools, there’s a resurgence of interest in resident software that executes on your desktop, yet connects to network services. Without a browser. Like Skype. Or QNext. Or Google Earth. And Java? OpenOffice and StarOffice?
If I were a betting man, I’d bet the world was about to change. And that what just happened in Massachusetts, when a state government made what was to me a very rational statement – we will pick an open standard to protect the right of our citizens to access data and services; we will then buy from vendors that support standards – will be a shot heard ’round the world.
What will they produce? Here’s John Paczkowski’s guess:
If Sun and Google do uncrate an office productivity solution — say a Sun Ray ultra-thin client optimized to run “Google Office” — that shot will definitely be heard up in Redmond, along with a lot of expletives and an anguished scream or two. Because if anyone can shift personal computing out of Microsoft’s domain and into the open, it’s Google.
Interesting times. Watch this space.
The real impact of broadband
Yesterday I was trying to remember how to adjust something on my venerable Hasselblad 6×6 camera. I knew I had the manual which came with it when I bought the camera many years ago, but it lay entombed somewhere in the chaos of my study. So instead of spending ages searching for it, I looked for a copy on the Web. Even though the Hasselblad site denied all knowledge of the publication, Google found it — buried deep in the site’s archives. So I downloaded the document, located the pages I needed and solved the problem. In minutes. This is kind of simple thing was was inconceivable before the Web (and Google?).
Later… When putting the camera away later in the evening, I found the missing manual — exactly where it should be!
Is Microsoft’s enemy our friend?
My Observer article about the long term significance of Google…
A few months ago Bill Gates let slip an interesting thought about Google in an interview. It reminded him, he said, of Microsoft in its honeymoon period – ie. the decade 1985-95. This is the first time in recorded history that Gates has dignified a competitor by actually naming it in public: generally, he speaks only in paranoid generalities. But the Microsoft chairman knows trouble when he sees it, and Google does indeed pose a long-term threat to his profitable monopoly.
That’s par for the course in the capitalist jungle. A more important question is whether Google spells trouble for the rest of us in the long run. And the answer to that could well be yes…
My colleague Conal Walsh goes into more detail on the privacy front.
Computing and global warming
Wow! Fascinating post by Martin Varsavsky. Excerpt:
Computing also requires enormous amounts of electricity. Every new chip developed requires more and more energy to function. If present trends continue computing and computing use and interconnection will soon make up 20% of all our electricity needs up from a current 7%. The person who brought this to my attention was Larry Page. During a session at CGI I asked Larry what he thought were Google´s limit to growth. His surprising reply was: electricity. Google he explained to me is by now the world´s largest owner of computers and therefore the internet´s biggest electricity user. This Larry said was of great concern to him and he was looking of ways to make Google carbon neutral.
Google finds Roman villa
Yep. From Nature (so it must be true!)
Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It was the meander of an ancient river, visible because former watercourses absorb different amounts of moisture from the air than their surroundings do.
His eye was caught by unusual ‘rectangular shadows’ nearby. Curious, he analysed the image further, and concluded that the lines must represent a buried structure of human origin. Eventually, he traced out what looked like the inner courtyards of a villa.
Google Blog Search
At last… Google has launched a service for searching Blogs. Hallelujah!
And lest we get too complacent…
… see this column by Polly Toynbee in today’s Guardian. Sample:
Before we get too piously smug about America, just imagine a flood crashing through the Thames barrier and drowning London and Essex. What would we see? Essentially the same thing, even if mayor Ken Livingstone did evacuation well. The middle classes would escape to friends and relatives. The poor who have no networks beyond other poor people would collect in camps. They would be as pitifully helpless and there would be millions of them too. In New Orleans people couldn’t get away for lack of the price of a taxi out of town. In London too, floods would expose what is hidden to well-off Britain because we also live strictly segregated lives. Housing-estate ghettoes are never entered by the 75% homeowners, places hidden even in the next street.
Poor London victims would also have nothing more than the clothes they stood in. Nationally 27% of people have no savings, not one penny; 25% of the poorest have at least £200 in debts, which would track them down to their refugee camps; 12% of households (many more individuals) have no bank account – even for those with basic accounts, banks never lend so much as a bus fare to those who most need it. A quarter of households have no insurance; they would lose everything.
Vint Cerf joins Google
Yep — according to AP,
Google has hired Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf to float more ideas and develop new products, adding another weapon to the online search engine leader’s rapidly growing arsenal of intellect.
If they can lure Bob Kahn then they’ve got a full house!