Google takes logical next step

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John Markoff’s had the nod…

SAN FRANCISCO, June 5 — Stepping up its attack on Microsoft’s core business, Google plans to make available on Tuesday a test version of a Web-based spreadsheet program that is intended to make it simple to edit and share lists and data online.

The company said that the free program, called Google Spreadsheets, would be able to read and create files in the format used by Excel, the Microsoft spreadsheet software that is installed on millions of personal computers. The spreadsheet service is another step in Google’s steady march toward creating its own computing universe that is an alternative to desktop PC software now dominated by Microsoft. It comes just months after Google bought a small Silicon Valley company called Upstartle, creators of a Web-based word-processing program called Writely…

What took them so long?

Later…There’s lots of commentary in the Blogosphere today about what this signifies. The obvious interpretation is that Google is really attacking Microsoft. If it is, then it’s doing so in a really smart way, because it’s refusing to fight on Microsoft’s territory — which is the platform, i.e. the PC. Google has declined to compete in that space and is providing services on the Web which offer a severely limited amount of the functionality that Microsoft provides in its PC software. Nicholas Carr has an interesting post to this effect. Extract:

So why would Google put out a product that makes its arch-rival’s product more valuable? Because Google doesn’t want to compete with Office. It sees Office as part of the existing landscape, and it wants to build a new layer of functionality on top of that landscape. No one is going to stop buying Office because Google Spreadsheets exists. But what people may well do is use Spreadsheets for sharing Excel and other data online – rather than just emailing Excel files around, as they used to. If Google Spreadsheets competes with a Microsoft product, it competes with a Microsoft product that doesn’t yet exist: Excel Live, Microsoft’s own web interface for Excel data.

Leica – a la carte

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Well, this takes the biscuit!…

To give this quality an unmistakable, personal touch, Leica is now offering you an ambitious unique modular system. The Leica à la carte principle lets you configure your own Leica M camera, which will then be produced just for you. You choose all of the individual details that perfectly suit your functional, esthetic and practical preferences, starting with the color of the camera top and type of leather finish, following with different viewfinder frames and ending with personal engravings such as signatures and markings which clearly prove that your Leica is a unique item. Of course, this is only possible because each Leica is made by hand in the traditional way practised in the factory in Solms.

Er, no mention of anything as vulgar as price. I’m sticking with my (black) M6.

Missing columns

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For the last two Sundays some unexplained glitch has prevented the publication of my column on the Web edition of the Observer. While an explanation is being sought (and the Editor looks for The Guilty Man) I’ve decided to go in for a spot of self-publication.

The column for May 28 is here. It’s about corporate hubris and the risks thereof. Sample:

Nothing succeeds like success, especially in the wishful thinking of technology companies and their Wall Street shareholders. The moment a company shows signs of dominating a particular market, then its executives — and their stockholders — begin to dream about dominating other markets in which they had hitherto no expertise. They are encouraged in this delusion by the mainstream media, which are irresistibly fascinated by the hubris implicit in corporate megalomania.

The best-known case study is, of course Microsoft…

But the column is actually as much about Google as about the Gates empire.

The column for today (4 June) is here. Sample:

If, like me, you while away the time while waiting for a Tube train by browsing the display ads on the wall opposite the platform, you will have been struck by some recent Microsoft advertisements. They show office workers wearing dinosaur-head masks engaging in laboured banter, in which one worker berates the other for his or her obsolete work practices.

My first reaction was to conclude that Microsoft had picked a turkey of an advertising agency, because the ads and the dialogue are so entirely devoid of the creativity that large advertising budgets are supposed to command. But this rapidly gave way to puzzlement. You see, it’s clear that the people in the ads are users of Microsoft software: they have to be because most office workers are. So why is Microsoft insulting its users by portraying them as dinosaurs? After all, treating your customers as idiots is not generally a sustainable business strategy — though the record and movie industries haven’t quite twigged that yet. But Microsoft isn’t a brain-dead organisation like Sony BMG or Warner Brothers. Au contraire. So what’s going on with these daft ads?

Al Gore’s Keynote address

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There’s been a lot of careless talk in the mainstream media about Al Gore’s “PowerPoint presentation” on global climate change. In fact he uses Keynote, an Apple program. But I suppose it’s unrealistic to expect the average hack to appreciate the difference.

Dave’s new friend

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From today’s Guardian…

One of Conservative leader David Cameron’s new breed of business backers is a millionaire landlord who has been accused of using ruthless tactics against tenants. Trevor Pears, 42, whose family owns 15,000 properties, is alleged to be driving out small shops in favour of supermarkets and forcing out tenants through legal loopholes.Mr Cameron is trying to boost his party by adopting green themes and criticising big business. He has accused supermarkets of using their financial muscle to drive small shops out of business. Mr Pears is among the property tycoons and hedge fund traders who put up almost £500,000 for his leadership campaign. The tycoon has been heavily criticised by small shopkeepers in north London, where his firm owns rows of premises in Fortess Road, Kentish Town…

Such a nice friend, too. For example:

The Pears empire is estimated to be worth more than £1bn. In one year the family paid themselves a £42m dividend. But there have been repeated complaints about their methods. In 2000, they used what a court called a “repugnant” device to try to force out housing benefit tenants along the Brighton seafront. The company used the terms of obscure agreements to raise rents to an impossible £25,000 a year. It then sought evictions for arrears. The appeal court said this was “very serious”, and could have bankrupted tenants.

A Pears company bought housing blocks the same year from Greenwich Hospital, originally an elderly seafarers’ charity. Nick Raynsford, Labour MP for Greenwich and Woolwich, says the firm exploited its position once the property passed out of control of the crown. Rents were raised from £50 a week to £190 and many were forced out. Mr Raynsford said: “The Pears Group acted in a reprehensible way in their dealings with the elderly residents.”

A case of “Vote Dave, get Rachman” perhaps?

The wisdom of cr… er, lynch mobs

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Here’s an interesting echo of Jason Lanier’s rant about the stupidity of crowds — an intriguing NYT story about online vigilantism in China.

SHANGHAI, June 2 — It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of the country’s most popular Internet bulletin boards from a husband denouncing a college student he suspected of having an affair with his wife. Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack.

“Let’s use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons,” one person wrote, “to chop off the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband.”

Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams that hunted down the student, hounded him out of his university and caused his family to barricade themselves inside their home. It was just the latest example of a growing phenomenon the Chinese call Internet hunting, in which morality lessons are administered by online throngs and where anonymous Web users come together to investigate others and mete out punishment for offenses real and imagined.

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Problems of the “hive mind”

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Interesting essay by Jason Lanier challenging the “wisdom of crowds” hypothesis.

The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself. It’s been criticized quite a lot, especially in the last year, but the Wikipedia is just one experiment that still has room to change and grow. At the very least it’s a success at revealing what the online people with the most determination and time on their hands are thinking, and that’s actually interesting information.

No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous…