Hmm
The UK economy needs to be more creative and less like Google...
Whatever your view on Google they're one of the more creative corporations of the last decade.
Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman has slammed Google's extraordinary influence over the UK's ruling Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. The Shadow Deputy Prime Minister said "there are three parties in the Coalition: the Tories, the Lib Dems, and Google". It's the strongest attack yet on the Google-Tory …
Creative how?
They've been technologically savvy and have build a very impressive distributed infrastructure on top of which they've built a rather good search engine. And then they've made a massive ad-pushing empire. The rest though? They've had a small handful of interesting acquisitions which they've exploited well (giving us Google Maps and GMail) and a few more 'me too' products that have done very well (Android) but were not novel in any particular way.
Their technical acumen and financial creativity is to be commended, but they prosper when the fruits of other people's creativity, in the form of things that people actually want to see, read or listen to, are available to Google for free and without restriction. This does not benefit the creators of those works nearly as much, hence the accusations of parasitism.
Whatever your view on Google they're one of the more creative corporations of the last decade
What's your definition of creative? It looks to me like they just bought shitloads of existing companies and ideas.
By the same definition, this also makes Microsoft one of the most creative companies in the history of computer tech.
They have the same business model as Google, buy what ever you need to and slap the corporate logo on it.
Christ, even Ebay has been as 'creative' as that in recent years.
I beleive you will find that the original Google search engine was just a copy/clone of DECs search engine called Altavista.
The big difference was they spent more time on the automatic filters than DEC did, but AltaVista was better at using words AND, OR, NOT and the realy good NEAR (ie: words must be within same sentence) keywords for searches.
Labour were quite happy arse kissing the Murdoch empire when they were in power and are no doubt trying to kiss it again.
PS Don't forget folks it was Nu-labour's Handy Pandy Mandy who rammed the DEA through in their last session of parliament.
All Politicians kiss big media's ass so they get favourable press and this is why we at the bottom of the shit pile get shafted with protectionist cartel laws that ends up making us pay through the nose.
So Labour were corrupt. So they will jump at the opportunity to do again if they regain power. So they were incompetent. That won't change either.
That doesn't actually make Harman's point invalid, does it?
Stop getting hung up on the hypocrisy. The content is still relevant.
@RU
Harman's point just makes me shrug my shoulders and say so what it's just tired old political point scoring that we have cycling around parliament day in day out that supposed to give us some sort of moral outrage. How can I get hung up on hypocritical wind bagging from politicians ? I expect them to be amoral so whoever takes this stance I'm going to shout crap and throw rotten vegetables at them.
The Lib dems, two faced? For doing exactly what they said they would before the election, I suppose. That is that they formed a coalition with the party who had the most votes.
Of course people like you seem to think that, everything that's happened after the election which is bad is down to the Lib Dems and everything which is good, hasn't happened at all. The Lib dems in no way tempered some of the more extreme policies of the Tories and they've done nothing except bad things, since they were in power.
I'd also have a pretty healthy stab at you not having bothered to vote at all, because you sound exactly like a few people I know from down the pub, who whinge about politicians, throw around words like "evil", but never actually vote "coz it's not worth it."
Google have been approached by the Government Digital Service (GDS, part of the Cabinet Office) to help with our government's attempts to provide identity assurance so that public services can be delivered online/become digital by default.
Google have been approached to help with the Dept of Business Innovation and Skills so-called "midata" project.
And, as cloud computing service providers, they have been linked to the plans for G-Cloud.
If Google succeed in getting contracts for all or some of these initiatives they will effectively become part of the Constitution. On that, Ms Harman is right.
In the end, the decisions will be made or strongly influenced by Sir Bob Kerslake, head of the home civil service, and Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister. Are they qualified to make those decisions?
They are advised by people like Andy Nelson, government and Ministry of Justice CIO, and ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken at GDS. The latter, at least, seems to be under the misapprehension that governing the UK is a bit like running Amazon or eBay.
http://www.dmossesq.com/2012/04/amazon-google-facebook-et-al-latter-day.html
That while lobbying would be hard and probably counterproductive to actually make illegal there should be some minimum requirement that the lobbying organisation pays a sensible amount of UK tax (perhaps directly in proportion to the amount of influence it can pay for).
Seeing companies which actively avoid uk tax funnelling relatively small amounts of money to our absurd political class in order to skew the policy agenda is distasteful even by normal political standards.
Oddly enough, the ancient Greeks already solved the problem of career politicians.
Their representatives were chosen randomly from the population by lot and then used meetings to get the majority opinion on issues in order to move things along.
I'm not sure quite how we would make something similar work in our society (we are talking about substantially more people to represent), but it would prevent career politicians and probably put a significant dent in the influence of those businesses and individuals who lobby our current mob.
It would also get shot of the useless suits like my local "representative" who has only ever voted with his party and never so much as even asked an awkward question.
"Oddly enough, the ancient Greeks already solved the problem of career politicians.
Their representatives were chosen randomly from the population by lot and then used meetings to get the majority opinion on issues in order to move things along."
Not quite - in Athens, for example (which is the model normally referred to), although the majority were selected that way, a certain amount were elected (often to the plum posts). Also, different city-states used different forms of government.
Very importantly, the entire population wasn’t included for the lots under the Athenian– male citizens only. When women (Athens abhorred Sparta for letting women have more rights), slaves (which Athens was renowned for) and men who didn’t qualify as being a citizen (born in another city-state but lived there for 50 years? Tough.), are taken account, the pool of people that could be selected for office, was a minority of the population.
At the time, the Athenian model had plenty of critics… whatever the system, people will find fault!
I thought that the alleged creative industries are actually pretty small, they are only perceived as being important because they, er, big themselves up (as the yoof say, I believe) relentlessly.
The same goes for football clubs, it is not big business, it is medium business at best.
Or am I out of date (genuine question - I don't work somewhere with big books of SIC codes and this sort of data any more).
Are we a net exporter of TV these days, anyway?
At a conservative estimate, the creative industries account for roughly 6 or 7 per cent of GDP. (Some put the figure as high as 8 or 9 per cent.) Within the creative industries, the largest export sector is publishing, an entirely copyright dependent industry.
Television exports are booming, I believe. (See for instance http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/oct/02/life-on-mars-russian-remake.)
The Tory government was on course to implement a full, open standards based platform government wide when New Labour came in - who promptly hobnobbed with Microsoft and went as quick as they could get away with to the proprietary route (remember the "Open Standards" gateway - which needed IE to work?).
Don't tell me it isn't so - I was actually there.
I assume the friendships are still in place, and Microsoft really needs a leg up on Bing. Don't get me wrong, I'm positively no fan of Google, but the sudden enthusiasm and bleating about anti-competitiveness is IMHO *extremely* suspect, especially from that corner.
Anon, because I've already said more than I should.
In the old world of copyright, rockstars were hugely entertaining, got rich and spent their money on groupies, drugs, and shooting up televisions with guns.
In the new world, online entrepreneurs are hugely boring, get rich and spend their money on sensible cars and new hoodies.
So, there is something to be said for copyright after all.
"said Harman, who was speaking at the BPI's AGM in London." Last words of last sentence in AO piece. Of course she's going to say that to them. Just as she would say if she was talking to the Open Rights Group - "we need reform" . A politician pitching to an audience -wow that's new. Talking about pitching, if you dig into the programme notes for the AGM [1] you'll find 3 speakers from You Tube setting out what You Tube can do for BPI members. You Tube - that's owned by Google isn't it?
[1] http://www.bpi.co.uk/press-area/news-amp3b-press-release/article/bpi-agm-2012-tuesday-3rd-july-full-details-announced.aspx