Google's Page: Dying Jobs called ME, I didn't call him Larry Page has been back at the helm of Google for a year now, but so far his second tenure as the Chocolate Factory boss has been marred by his blinkered focus on overhauling the company to become much more of a social property online. In a mildly probing interview with Bloomberg Businessweek yesterday, Page defended his biz …
It must be tricky when you create a product which is a runaway success, which works well and doesn't need drastic changes. You can't really just say "we're done" and rake in the cash, you feel compelled to do new things and grow, etc.
Google could sit there and rake in the billions without doing much at all - social ads are clearly a powerful thing but web-searching isn't going anywhere.
That's what I would have done. Probably why my business isn't worth $billions.
But how much of a "runaway success" is it really, if the product makes no money? It's true, Google created a service which ended up being the best of breed and loved by all, but which had to be modified from it's original design in order to make money and support a business.
The problem is that, as long as Google "owned" the Web, as they seemed to do for some time, they could avoid impacting their flagship service with much intrusive ads, because the sheer scale of their usage made enough money with minimum ads. However, this is predicated on Google being the de facto portal to the Web and all online services and destinations.
The truth is that they didn't contemplate this changing, or at least not so soon.
It's not that Google needs to be Facebook in order to survive in the current marketplace; it's that they need to be *something else* than what they are right now. People are accessing online services through myriad other resources that are not Google, and "Web Search" is much less relevant at the moment.
Some may call these "silos," but in essence, they are specialized utilities. Just like the electric company provides you electricity and the water works company provides you with water and sewage service, different online resources provide different services. That they require discrete information from you to do this, well, that's par for the course--the water and electric companies also need to know where you live and how you like to pay, and by extension of you being a customer, will always know how you consume their services.
Google chose to be Facebook, because they thought that turning search algorithms for online web pages into a social-graph analysis machine would be simple (perhaps it is), but mostly because Facebook was raking in the money, and Google wanted some of that.
-dZ.
about jobs and android/google. am i convinced that jobs, a good sales and marketing man that he was, was one of the first to recognize the value and potential of android. in his nightmares he probably saw it gobbling up the market share before those who made android would even dare dream about it. the amount of aggression towards android just showed how much jobs thought it was worth as a competitor.
With news of Android passing 50% in market share Jobs vision is unquestionable, he was right to turn on Android as much as possible and turn as many screws as he could. At the end of the day ubiquitous application over many devices will trump singular premium products.
It's simple market economics, and Apple have had a huge lead and headstart but the field is catching up, and they will return to a niche product, and still make a lot of money. The same rules always apply.
Simple microeconomics means profit is preferable to market share.
Market economics, however, is based on market share; profit technically doesn't even enter into it.
As for a race to the bottom, well, yes. That's generally where focusing solely on market share puts you.
(See, Jeebus, it is possible to win an argument and be a condescending arse without resorting to ad hominem!)
>Page had a little moan about Facebook's refusal to let the Chocolate Factory gain access to the contact details of users on Mark Zuckerberg's siloed network.
And I am grateful for FB's stance on that.
Don't get me wrong. I don't necessarily think badly of Google by itself. I use gmail after all. And I am willing to put up with FB and disclose a limited amount of information because I find FB useful.
But I have enough problem worrying about FB's ever-changing privacy settings without worrying about what Google searches show of my FB data.
Keep Google out of it!
Who cares if Steve Jobs called you... did you really need clarify that point.
Also, he is totally above competition and Google only follows their own brilliant ideas with no regard for what others are doing.... except that is not at all the case. Google as a company is built on iterative improvement to existing concepts and technologies, as are most companies. They refined Yahoo's search, the refined webOS and RIM's smartphone OS, they refined a bunch of companies webmail. I am not saying that they were not all superior to their predecessors, but Google needs to stop pretending that they are the Buddhist monks of IT that are only around to create their own mind blowing technologies for the pleasure they derive in creation itself. You're an advertising company that invents interesting ways of putting ads in peoples' faces.
It's worth noting that Jobs may well have been angry that Android was making the inroads on iStuff that it was, but it doesn't automatically follow that Jobs was angry at Google -- had it been Nokia who stepped up to the competitive plate, then it may well have been Symbian that attracted Job's ire.
And that's the point: those who claim Android was a copy of iOS need to recognize that iOS was a copy of Symbian and/or whatever Palm called their stuff. Of course, the iPhone did _most_ things better than, say, the Nokia E61, but it did some things worse (tethering, for instance). What the iPhone did achieve was a marketing success based on the alliance of the functionality with the "usability" of the device -- but the number of "original" things that Android could have copied (from iOS) is smaller than you think; it copies more from Palm and Nokia than Apple.
And don't forget Windows Mobile 'classic' (5 and 6, and I guess PocketPC before them). In 2007 I had an HTC Kaiser. This was a touchscreen phone with A-GPS including turn-by-turn navigation and spoken instruction, HSDPA, the ability to play music/movies (and even Quake 2), stream Video over the Internet, voice recognition, WiFi, Bluetooth, two cameras, expandable storage and a battery that would last all day. Additionally it was loaded with gesture unlock, handwriting recognition (which was admittedly awful), multiple 'start' screens that you slid between (custom ROM), Exchange (and other email/Calendar/Tasks) sync, tethering over WiFi, USB and Bluetooth (well, a PAN), RS232 (allegedly- I never used it). It even had programs made for it before they were called 'Apps'. Other similar chipset devices even had TV-out, and there were rumours that the Kaiser could do that too...
Before that came out I had a stack of other PDAPhones that had similar featuresets, with each new generation bringing useful new features. And all of which had rounded corners.
I use an iPhone for work (foisted on me) and a Galaxy Note for home- so 5 years later I've finally got all those features back again, wrapped up in a nicer UI. And also an iPhone4.
1. Google never monetized Search, or Maps, or Talk ... They gave it away and just placed ads.
2. Facebook trolled for kids and others who knew not what they were doing with their personal data.
3. Facebook is a cancer. They did nothing different than AOL, GeoCities, Yahoo! Groups, MySpace, et al. except that they did it when the web was mature.
In the immortal words of Charlton Heston; from Soylent Green: "Facebook is people!"
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