Google's Six-Front War 249
wasimkadak writes "While the tech world is buzzing about the launch and implications of Google's new social network, Google+, it's worth noting that Google isn't just in a war with Facebook, it's at war with multiple companies across multiple industries. In fact, Google is fighting a multi-front war with a host of tech giants for control over some of the most valuable pieces of real estate in technology."
Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
The tech industry is basically building up the greatest case ever to be made for why patents, software patents especially, have transitioned away from their original intention and become far more a hindrance and obstruction rather than a means of getting useful knowledge out from closed circles.
Re:Patents (Score:4, Insightful)
...their original intention...
That's the part that everybody has gotten wrong so far.. Patents and copyrights are designed from the beginning to restrict the transfer and sharing of knowledge. If people are going to continue to claim property rights, they should pay a property tax. They should not be permitted to deny a license to use the property, and the government should be allowed to determine a reasonable price. Divulged knowledge is public property, exclusive privileges over it should come with a cost.
Re:Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Patents were made to ensure that in exchange for making information public, the inventor would get temporary exclusivity. The purpose was to get information that would have been held as a trade secret, or in past ages by trade guilds, and potentially lost. Now, of course, patents are useless as they rarely describe HOW to make the item in question, and are instead a vague concept grab and used not to protect the inventor but as clubs to beat others down with.
Copyright is similar, though it was meant to give creators some incentive to create.
They don't claim property rights. They confuse the issue with the poor phrase "intellectual property" even though it isn't.
They do come with a cost. Eventually they will lose the exclusive privilege to the information. The problems lie around the laws that make up copyright and patents.
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Copyright is similar, though it was meant to give creators some incentive to create.
They don't claim property rights. They confuse the issue with the poor phrase "intellectual property" even though it isn't.
Patents is a type of intellectual property by definition. Maybe this isn't true in your local jurisdiction, but it's certainly the case in the US, where Google is located.
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It is property because the law allows you to buy, sell, and transfer it.
Re:Patents (Score:5, Funny)
It is property because the law allows you to buy, sell, and transfer it.
Right; Just like, sex. In the US state of Nevada, and some other countries, the law allows you to buy and sell sex.
The term is "prostitution". Now, I don't know about you, but my sexual property rights are taxed heavily. Even if I choose not to exercise my ability to sell access to my amazing Johnson, I still have to list all the kinds of sex it can perform as taxable property when I file my taxes. Each time I get paid for sex I loose a little bit of my sexual property -- just like when you sell an idea!
Some clients have bought enough of my sex that they literally own most a majority say in the handling of it. ( You do have to be careful though -- Once, After I sold my sex, the client re-sold it on e-bay, and it was purchased by a 16 year old! I served 5 years for statutory rape! )
I once sold an idea that was so novel, it was in a totally invented on the spot language from a culture that existed only in my mind. A scarce resource like that -- the copyright traders, ie publishers, just had to have it, but they didn't count on the fact that no one but me knew what the strange symbols meant! Due to economics of scarcity, I'm now the richest man on InstainFrigth (that's Earth, but shhhh, don't tell anyone, it devalues my made up language).
Now, Don't tell me when you list your property you don't claim all of your ideas, passing thoughts, and your va-jay-jay!?
Why, those are 10 times more valuable than even a Big Johnson! You should talk to your accountant and maybe a sex or idea lawyer -- You could be liable for serious mental and sexual tax evasion; Even if you don't give a fuck!
I guess next you'll try to tell me that you are born with a head full of all the ideas you'll ever have, and a body full of all the fucks that you will ever give...
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I perfectly agree that patents are governmental constructs. Without governments, the rule of law, and a functioning court system, patents would not exist.
But I could argue that the concept of ownership is also just a social construct. In a lawless environment, I "own" everything that I can obtain with force. Without a functioning legal system the concept of ownership cannot be enforced.
Re:Patents (Score:4, Insightful)
The fundamental principle behind property is "might makes right". You own what you can prevent others taking from you.
The only difference between a lawful and lawless environment is that in the former you outsource the "might" part to designated groups of people (police, judges, etc).
However, this fundamental principle doesn't apply to "intellectual property" because it can't be taken, it can only be duplicated. No matter how much might you wield, you can't make someone forget something.
Forget this... (Score:2)
No matter how much might you wield, you can't make someone forget something.
Strictly speaking, electroconvulsive "therapy" [wikipedia.org] (especially bilateral with high currents) can effectively destroy memories. Luckily, there are legal restrictions on these procedures. But let's not give the intellectual property fiends another bad idea.
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I read so many stories about what is wrong with the patent system. And yet, nobody seems to come up with good ideas about reforming the patent system. Yes, people mention that the duration of patents should be at most X years and obvious software patents should not be allowed. But how to get these ideas generally accepted and implemented as laws is where the problem lies.
We have heard all the arguments against the patent system. So please, let's shift the focus of the discussion.
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...but that was in fact the spin
Actually I could see the the point of these laws to minimize plagiarism, but beyond that they are an anathema to progress.
Re:Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
... patents are designed to encourage otherwise secret matters to be made publicly available in exchange for a limited monopoly on their use. It would take a face much straighter than mine to claim, at least with respect to matters anywhere near software, that they are other than a mess today; but that was in fact the theory.
Actually, if you consult various histories of the concept of patent, you'll find that restricting patents to new inventions is a rather recent (17th C?) development. Historically, it has long been common to (as the the US Patent Office now does) give a patent to anyone willing to pay the appropriate registration fee.
As usual, wikipedia has an article that describes this [wikipedia.org], and mentions that it was James I who added the requirement to English law that a patent had to be for something new. He did this in response to some extreme abuse of the patent system to award common commodities (salt is mentioned) as a monopoly to a specific manufacturer, which effectively prevented previous manufacturers from continuing their business.
But this isn't the first documented case of such things. There are a number of descriptions of an ancient Greek cooking contest, in which the winner was awarded a patent for one year, during which nobody else could produce the same dish. There's no hint that the winning entry had to be new; it just had to be the one preferred by the panel of judges, exactly like modern cooking contests.
It's likely that the current US scheme of rewarding a patent for things well known in the industry isn't a corruption, but rather a return to the original use of patent law. It was designed to give a monopoly in exchange for paying whatever fee the local ruler(s) demanded.
(This may seem cynical to modern readers, but it doesn't take much reading of the relevant ancient histories for it to pass from cynicism to understanding that this is one way that rulers have always enriched themselves.)
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You are correct in saying that "Patents and copyrights are designed from the beginning to restrict the transfer and sharing of knowledge", in so far as to let the holder recoup R&D costs and turn a profit before the information becomes public.
Who would spend R&D resources just to have others duplicate the finished product with no investment? Patents ensure that creators will have time to recoup costs.
Now, there is a good argument that the le
Re:Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
OMG! How on earth did the human race survive for millenia before patents? You're so right, without patents nobody would ever invent anything and we'd all still be living in damp caves arguing about who was going to be the dumbass to pay the development costs of inventing fire...
Re:Patents (Score:4, Informative)
OMG! How on earth did the human race survive for millenia before patents? You're so right, without patents nobody would ever invent anything
This is really disingenuous. The issue of what we call now intelectual property is not new, and has existed long before patents and copyrights were introduced. Because there was no good mechanism for establishing and enforcing ownership of new inventions and discoveries, many creators refused to make them public, to the disadvantage of everybody else. Many skills and processes were passed only within a family, or a guild, or from master to apprentice, and their secret was jealously guarded. Look at the Venetian Republic, which ensured the monopoly of Murano glass for centuries, by forbidding glassmakers to leave the city; look at many scientists, like Galileo: in order to claim priority for his discoveries, he used to send encrypted descriptions to other scientists (see here [rice.edu] for details), and only make the discoveries public later. It's possible he had even discovered Neptune, back in 1613 (see here [spacedaily.com] for details) but he did not disclose it, fearing somebody else may claim it. As a result, the existence of Neptune remained unknown until 1846, that is more than two hundred years later.
Or check the thoughts of actual writers living in a period of weak or inexistent copyrights; look at Dickens here [moreintelligentlife.com] or Twain here [nytimes.com].
Re:Patents (Score:5, Interesting)
That's debatable. Guilds were government granted monopolies. They were able to keep their secrets for generations because the local king granted them the privilege of exclusive rights to their trade.
That's the reason why inventions and discoveries were closely guarded: because the guild members *could* - it was their right as guild members, and non-guild members were hunted down with the authorities' blessing.
Real progress did not come from the introduction of the patent system, and never will. Real progress has come from the liberalization of trade, and the breakup of the rigid feudal society. That's what has allowed more people than ever to devote time to inventions and discoveries, without worrying that some existing stakeholder will prevent them from doing so.
People are naturally inventive. They will improve systems and invent better ways of doing the things that matter to them, if we let them. Among the people, there are a small number with science backgrounds, and if we let them, they will invent and discover a lot more than now.
Re:Patents (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe because in the millennia before patents the costs of development were low and the reward was high? There was little cost to inventing fire, but the benefit of survival on a cold night sure would have been nice.
You can argue that possibly high cost development is a waste and that we're not better off as a society with that sort of R&D, but it seems a stretch to think that it would continue without the promise of financial compensation.
Re:Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Then why is it that the vast majority of inventors, scientists and artists who create the new inventions, discoveries and works of art, are employed for average salaries?
If your idea was right, then nobody would go to work for Sony, GM, IBM, Monsanto or any corporation that produces patentable tech: those corps can make millions in licensing new technology, yet their employees get 100K odd a year. That's a huge disconnect, that can only be explained by the opposite of your idea: people do in fact invent and create without the promise of monopolistic rights to their inventions.
Those rights mainly matter to sustain an entirely different class of people: not the inventors, scientists and artists, but the managers and investors whose sole concern is maximizing returns. If patents were abolished, they would suffer, but inventors would continue to invent at an increased pace.
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That kind of economics applies to every person, not just inventors. So it has no relevance to the question of whether patents foster inventions.
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OMG! How on earth did the human race survive for millenia before patents?
Without global communication, running water, food that was safe to eat, and an epically large pile of medicine.
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Without global communication, running water, food that was safe to eat, and an epically large pile of medicine.
Because none of those things would have happened without patents.
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Because none of those things would have happened without patents.
In the same time frame?
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Right, so how does motivation factor into this equation?
Re:Patents (Score:4, Interesting)
What I'm saying is that there's no evidence that patents cause an increase in the natural rate of invention. We have seen an explosion in the number of inventions over the last two centuries, but we have also seen an explosion in the number of skilled people over that period.
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Same as it always has. Survival, improvement, curiosity.
Okay, now in this case money is an added motivator.
We have seen an explosion in the number of inventions over the last two centuries, but we have also seen an explosion in the number of skilled people over that period.
That's easy enough to prove. Let's see a graph that shows the rate of inventions running parallel to the birth rate.
Re:Patents (Score:5, Informative)
Quick google search for patent applications [uspto.gov]
Quick google search for world population [npg.org]
Now cut and paste the data for years 1963-2010. I've used the 5th column (total utility patent applications) as this seems like it might be relevant. Clean up the data a bit:
cat patents.txt | awk '{print $5}' | sed s/,// | grep -v '*' | tac > pat.txt
cat population.txt | egrep '(^19|^20|^21)' | sed s/,//g > pop.txt
Now if you load this in octave, you can make a quick graph:
plot(pop(:,1), pat ./ pop(:,2)) [tinypic.com]
As you can see from the graph, the proportion of patent applications from around the world is roughly constant until about 1990, then it suddenly jumps up.
Obviously, this only represents US patents for a rather short time period compared to human existence, it would be interesting to find data to extend back two centuries if possible.
Does anyone know what happened in 1990 in the US to change the patent application rate?
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That's really interesting, man.
Does anyone know what happened in 1990 in the US to change the patent application rate?
Isn't that about the time LCD displays and 16-bit processors were starting to become ubiquitous?
Re:Patents (Score:5, Informative)
Does anyone know what happened in 1990 in the US to change the patent application rate?
That's a rhetorical question, right? Beginning 1990's the US courts, in a couple of landmark cases, decided that software patents were legal. What you're seeing is the ensuing land-grab.
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The same way they did prior to copyrights. There would be a wealthy land owner who would basically sponsor the work. That owner would by virtue of controlling the creation be in control of it.
If anything the version of patents up until relatively recently that was in place democratized the area as it allowed somebody to get some sort of payment without having to have a long list of inventions. There have been generous folks over the millenia that have given their inventions away, but there'd be fewer invent
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Patents were specifically designed from the beginning to not restrict the transfer and sharing of knowledge; there's a reason why patents granted are public and accessible to you. The person(s) applying for the patent share the details in order to claim exclusive right to exploiting their invention or innovation for a specific period of time, with the laws protecting them from someone copying their process. After the period of protection runs out, anyone can use the details posted to create & sell produ
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One of the very serious problems right now is punishing companies for trying to avoid infringing on anybody's patents. Get caught infringing you'll pay damages, be stupid enough to have conducted a patent search prior to being sued and you'll be looking at treble damages typically.
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That's the part that everybody has gotten wrong so far.. Patents and copyrights are designed from the beginning to restrict the transfer and sharing of knowledge.
False.
Patents and copyrights were designed to encourage the transfer and sharing of knowledge. In return, the inventor/writer is granted a limited monopoly to distribute the work in the case of copyright or license the use of the work in the case of patents. The underlying goal in the case of patents is to increase innovation both by providing greater access to the ideas of others (on which new inventions can build) and by providing an incentive to create via the monopoly grant.
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Patents and copyrights are designed from the beginning to restrict the transfer and sharing of knowledge.
Yeah, that's why they're very specific, detailed, and published for all to see.
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It's not about society. It's about protecting specific interests, to protect industry from the effects of new technology that threatens its existence. From Gutenberg's printing press right up through the present and into the future. There is very little difference between these rules and the "Red Flag" laws that attempted to interfere with the use of the horseless carriage. Imagine having to to disassemble and hide your computer or TV set every time you wanted to read a newspaper.
Re:Patents (Score:5, Informative)
It's not about society. It's about protecting specific interests, to protect industry from the effects of new technology that threatens its existence. From Gutenberg's printing press right up through the present and into the future.
Ah, but you're ignoring the well-documented fact that copyright was invented well before Gutenberg. The very name dates from before printing technology, when all texts had to be copied by hand, by scribes. And the first documented copyright had nothing to do with authorship; the concept was invented to control the copying of bibles and other religious texts, whose authors were centuries dead (and often unknown). The function of copyright was to legally restrict the production of religious texts to only the versions officially approved by the local rulers, and to keep the number of copies sufficiently low that only the priesthood could get copies.
The application of copyright to original documents, for economic reasons, was an innovation of the late 15th century, some decades after Gutenberg's work, and a century or so after the first print shops appeared in Europe.
But most of the history of copyright is about limiting the production of hand-copied text to only "authorized" versions, primarily for religious reasons. The extension to commercial transactions is, historically speaking, rather recent.
As is so often true now, there's a useful wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] that summarizes this, and includes some useful links (for people who want to actually understand the history rather than just repeat the current commercial propaganda on the topic ;-).
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Yeah, except that your "useful wikipedia article" makes absolutely no mention of copyrights existing "before Gutenberg", instead taking the (very conventional) approach of dating copyright from "efforts by the church and governments to regulate and control the output of printers".
Before printing, copying was a laborious process that required scarce resources, highly trained labor and - above all - a great deal of time. To say that the church "controlled" what was copied is a bit like saying that the US gove
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APK, shut the fuck up and find a hobby that does not involve the Internet.
*ahem* There. That feels much better.
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Because the only way to make something valuable is to make it scarce, and the only way to make something with an infinite supply scarce is to create a legal structure that restricts access to it.
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Patent's goal is exactly the opposite of that though, because to get a patent you are supposed to be required to divulge exactly how your $PATENTABLE_THING functions. The alternative is Inventors keeping their methods and designs secret until someone else figures is out, rather than being given legal protection for a limited period of time in exchange for divulging their methods and designs.
The amount of time that protection lasts might be too long (especially for copyright, somewhat less so for patents),
Great (Score:2)
Google has a tendancy to create awesome stuff and has the money to back it up.
Hopefully it'll wake up a few competitors who might just want to try something better.
Or they could end up squabbling over patents. Whatever works.
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Incontheivable. (Score:2, Funny)
As long as they don't get involved in a land war in Asia.
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Apparently General Montgomery never heard of Genghis Khan and Nurhaci.
More Fronts (Score:3)
Google has an advantage (Score:3)
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Obviously they can offer paid side services on top of this, like gmail for enterprise and google earth pro. Even android is about getting users on their platform, having their eyeballs where they want them.
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Even android is about getting users on their platform, having their eyeballs where they want them.
I disagree, Android is about preventing a single actor (apple) to be too dominant and be able to leverage this dominance to be the sole vector of ads on a platform (as apple is planning/doing) therefore potentially preventing google to display ads on said platform.
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Does anyone else notice that Google has a lot of failed products and services?
I'm not applying a value judgement to that just yet, as it may be a byproduct of a high innovation rate and willingness to take risks. However Google has this great reputation as a winning company and yet I'm struck by how many of their products have cratered.
Recent examples would have to include Google Wave and Google Buzz. Google Books seems to have become bogged down in endless bickering.
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There are basically two ways to make money on the Internet: advertising, and having users pay for the service. This not counting "e-commerce" sites, which are basically not different from a traditional mail-order service with an online instead of a paper catalogue.
These days, many services are free, they are of high quality, users have come to expect such services to be free, and most are not willing to pay for it.
E-mail service: hotmal/gmail/yahoo/etc are all free, have always been, will always be. Can't
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This reminds me of an article I read a while ago. All the stuff Google creates seem less to do with monetizing those services directly and more to do with protecting their search business. I believed the author described it as a moat. Google is more than willing to give you billions of dollars of free stuff if they can continue to make tens of billions on search advertising. Truthfully, I'm not sure why they haven't been investigated for tying already. While they don't specifically require you to use their
Yawn (Score:2)
Business not a zero sum game (Score:5, Interesting)
Business is different. Business is about creating value where none exists. It is about taking a junk mushroom and turning it into a premium product. It is about taking a piece of land no one wants and turning it into a resort. In the process inefficient companies die, but they are not causalities of war. They are simply relics of a bad past that we are happy to see left behind.
So why is this important? If it is war then we fight to maintain market share, a perceived limited resource, which is what the American automakers diid, which is why MS is doing, which is what all those insurance companies and banks are doing. However if it is not a war then we are in a situation of an expanding and fruitful economy that will grow as we innovate. This si the world in which we have jobs and new toys. This is IBM. This is Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Corporation.
If we are at war, we do not innovate, we copy. It is the difference between Google using graph theory to create a index method different from Yahoo and Alta Vista and Google creating an phone not unlike the iPhone. It is the difference between Alta Vista that stood on market share and did not innovate, and Yahoo who understood there was room in search for more than one way to serve the customer.
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But your examples of copying are not zero sum. Android is valuable despite copying the iPhone, it's different enough, and more importantly it grows the market in a way that Apple wasn't going to. And if companies fight for market share by making their products more valuable then this is not zero sum either, it's zero sum for the competing companies, but extra value is created for their customers.
War doesn't have to be zero sum either. If it's a war over land and resources then yes, but if it's a war over po
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But your examples of copying are not zero sum. Android is valuable despite copying the iPhone, it's different enough, and more importantly it grows the market in a way that Apple wasn't going to.
That was a new market. Banks, insurances, Microsoft all operate in a more-or-less saturated market. Big difference. Android can grow alongside iPhone. Linux can only grow by taking market share from other companies like Microsoft, and thus threatening Microsoft directly.
War doesn't have to be zero sum either. If it's a war over land and resources then yes, but if it's a war over political ideals then no.
War tends to be a negative-sum business. Remember: war has no winners, only losers. The "winner" is just the one that lost less.
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In the immortal words of Ricky Ricardo, "Lucy, you've got some defining to do!" This never occurred to me, but now that you mention it, I can see how it equates to zero. One guy gets shot in the trenches, lies groaning in the mud and feces holding his intestines inside his belly with a tin dinner plate. The guy who shot him survives the firefight, goes off to the nearest Asian brothel so shoot up with a grade of heroine you can only obtain in the Asian jungle. Mise
Re:Business not a zero sum game (Score:5, Insightful)
By what definition? I would consider war to be a negative-sum game.
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Only if you don't consider the consequences of not going to war. For instance, I'm very glad that France and Britain declared war on the Axis. I have little doubt that the world would have been a worse place now if they hadn't.
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Does that still make up for the loss of life and destruction?
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With the current population higher than ever in history, yes, I think advancements have made up for a few deaths along the way. Might not be a popular view, but there you have it, we have a better quality of life today, because our descendants were aggressive bastards.
Pet peeve (Score:3)
it's supposed to be "for all intensive purposes"
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The difference is how it is fought as far as if it will be good for the customers. There are 2 ways to win marketshare, Method 1. Continue to add features capabilities and functionality and/or lower the cost to the point where the product is a significant step above the competition that people want to use it, ensure that if the competition wants to compete, they have to match your pace. Method 2. Stranglehold the competition, find ways to prevent the competition from developing, use legal forces/patents, cr
In case you don't want to read the article (Score:3)
The Browser Front - chrome/IE/Firefox etc
The Mobile Front - Android vs iPhone vs all others
The Search Front - Duh
The Local Front - Groupon, Daily Deals, Foursquare, etc. The Social Front - trying to kill Facebook
The Enterprise Front - Google apps vs Office, Google mail vs Exchange, etc.
Add some filler text and you have the article.
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The interesting thing is that is almost all cases, Google are invading, not defending. They are one the few companies to have the skills, the vision and the money to try and shake up markets. I wish them well, and with others would be as active/aggressive. Also, because they are active on so many fronts, they can fail at one without catastrophic consequences - except Search !
Looking at the list of the biggest tech companies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_global_technology_companies):
There
Re:In case you don't want to read the article (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot in 2001: "Microsoft is evil. They're trying to leverage their success with Windows to take everybody down. They want to conquer everything and have you using Microsoft-branded operating systems, browsers, phones, webjournals, email, and more."
Slashdot in 2011: "Google is awesome. They're leveraging the success of their search engine to enter these markets with their fantastic vision. I can't wait to use Google-branded operating systems, browsers, phones, blogs, email, and more."
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Google and Microsoft are quite similar. No matter what I do, there are one or two products that I end up using or needing anyway. It just takes one event for people to change their mind about tech companies. For most people, Google hasn't done anything wrong yet. That's the difference between Microsoft and Google. I think in most people's eyes, Microsoft's pricing and activation as well as failures with vista have been more of a reputation fail than the antitrust trial or IE ever were. Young people don
Re:In case you don't want to read the article (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference: MS was trying to force people to use their new products. Google is creating good products and inviting people to use the
Looks like Google's marketing was successful.
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Don't worry (Score:5, Funny)
As long as Google doesn't invade Russia in the winter everything will be allright.
Re:Don't worry (Score:4, Informative)
No one invades Russia in the winter. They invade hoping Russia will surrender before winter. It doesn't work.
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It's also important they don't get involved in a land war in Asia.
War? Pics, please ... (Score:2)
Am I the one one here who thinks it's time to start reigning in this use of "war" for situations in which nobody is dying?
We should be demanding that the authors of such propaganda be required to document instances of rape, pillage and/or murder by the participants in such purported "wars". If they can't document google's bombing raids, etc., then they should be required to edit their reports to use more accurate terms for what google is actually doing to their victims.
(Actually, a lot of us would like
Gibber (Score:5, Interesting)
The first two fronts are misunderstood by the author. I didn't bother reading further.
Front 1) Chrome
He implies that Google is in the browser battle to control the browser and get everybody over to chrome. In fact - google is in the browser battle to raise the game. They're totally happy if ie maintains market share as long as ie does a better job at javascript and html5 so that users can use gmail, google docs, etc.
Google are clearly winning here - all the browsers have significantly improved their javascript performance and standards compliance since Chrome made them start competing again.
Front 2) Android
He implies the reason Android doesn't have the developer support is due to fragmentation of devices. Completely wrong - the reason Android doesn't have developer support is that Google haven't trained everyone to buy apps, and so the financial rewards for developers are way lower.
Apple gets your payment method on day 1, and makes it easy for you to buy stuff with successful instant fulfilment. Google has a crappy dysfunctional checkout system and make no attempts to collect your payment details until you decide to bite the bullet and buy an app. At that point, they make the process painful and unsatisfying so that you are put off from ever trying again.
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Google are clearly winning here - all the browsers have significantly improved their javascript performance and standards compliance since Chrome made them start competing again.
I'd say browser competition was quite hot already with Firefox taking over a huge chunk of IE's market, and Safari being released for Windows. Chrome just heated it up a bit more.
And anyway that's a great thing I'd say. I'd love to see a world with 3, 4 major browsers, each having at least some 15-20% market share, no more than 50% for any single one. That forces them to follow standards as it's too much to expect web developers to develop browser-specific. Actually considering the latest browser usage sta
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Google has a crappy dysfunctional checkout system and make no attempts to collect your payment details until you decide to bite the bullet and buy an app. At that point, they make the process painful and unsatisfying so that you are put off from ever trying again.
Huh? Are you referring to the app market or something else? The google mobile market is painless and easy to buy apps. You hit buy and it charges your card on file. You get the app. Done and done. What could be easier?
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But that was GP's point. It's precisely why there are more quality apps on iOS.
Surprise, surprise... (Score:4, Interesting)
.
It looks like far too many people are accustomed to the days when Microsoft's monopoly ruled and crippled the tech industry. Fortunately, those days seem as distant as a Windows mobile device with a 50% marketshare.....
I, for one, welcome competition for google, and any other company that becomes a global powerhouse.
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I just hope Google doesn't become a monopoly in these areas. Compeition is good! Let the war continue. ;)
Swiss Army Knife (Score:2)
Only search matters (Score:5, Interesting)
Google revenue: 94% ads. Ad revenue: 70% ads on search pages, 30% ads elsewhere (Adsense, YouTube, etc.). That's what matters.
If Google does anything for which they charge customers money, the customers will expect support. Google hates providing support. They gave up selling Android handsets when they discovered that unhappy customers would call them. Even the rare Google business-to-business products, like the Google Search Appliance, were unsupported. (If it broke during warranty, they shipped you a new one.) This limits Google to ad-supported business lines. Since they already dominate the one really profitable ad-supported business line, search, any area into which they expand is less profitable than the one they're in. So expansion reduces ROI and stock price.
Getting into "social" doesn't help much. Facebook is dinky compared to Google. Facebook has hit its peak size, and it still generates an order of magnitude less revenue than Google.
Re:Buzzing (Score:5, Interesting)
That said I don't trust them to keep anything going long term. Every time I find something useful, it gets taken away, Google Health the most recent on the chopping block. And I'm sure we can make a list of other that have fallen to the wayside. Wave of course. I even dialed 800-Goog-411 the other day to get a phone # and it was gone.
It's hard to want to invest in personalizing anything Google these days. I use to feel secure thinking my "Gmail" account would be around a while. These days I'm not so sure.
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I even dialed 800-Goog-411 the other day to get a phone # and it was gone.
Yup, they shut that down after getting enough voice search data. 1-800-Bing-411 should still be up, though.
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I'm sorry, but your post looks a lot like FUD.
Why? Because they are things you didn't use?
Google Notebook? Some of us actually used that.
Google Video? Some of us used that too. Sure we could move to Youtube or Vimeo or 100 sites now. Point is Google Video ended.
Wave? Yeah, it was never huge, but I got a lot of people signed up and had quite a few good Waves.
Yes, I use/used Google Health. So what? Again I get burned.
There's more I never used. Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Catalog Search, Mashup, Lively, Google Answers, etc that I never used,
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Gamble on new, experimental, unpopular, or auxiliary services if you must
I guess that's exactly my point on this Google+ and the "Social Front" the article talks about.
Do I bother investing time and setting up Google+ and investing personal time in it? What I've learned with Google is wait and see else don't be surprised if all the time you've invested sort of goes "POOF" and turns into a... well... 'Cloud', of smoke that is.
Business *is* war (Score:2)
And treating it as anything else gets you a fast track one-way trip to bankruptcy.
Just doeskin have all the killing and maiming you get in a "traditional" war ( normally.. )
Re:Business *is* war (Score:5, Informative)
What's really interesting here is that this is a war to block a new paradigm in software and services revenue generation. Google makes money from ad generation and they can share that with the hardware vendors. Mozilla would not be anything like it is today if it were not for the $50+ million they got annually from Google as ad revenue sharing. This scares the shit out of Microsoft, Sony, Apple, the telecoms, etc. They do not want to see their revenue streams diverting to a mechanism they do not control and they are not competent at. The whole Nortel Networks patent buy was basically the old guard blocking the new kid from building a protection wall against them. Right now, you fight patent litigation with more patent litigation but you have to have a patent pool to fight with.
I for one welcome my now overlords since the old overlords have shown they are not interesting in anything but control and locking us into and onto their products. Products which have stagnated when they have had that control. This is war, it just is not a conventional war and I think Google has to get out into those other areas only because companies like Microsoft have been documented it that they are out to put Google down. Not unlike how Bill and Steve decided Netscape must go, Microsoft has decided that Google must go. They are fighting, they have to fight because if they don't Microsoft will shut them down like they shut down Netscape. IMO
LoB
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Google is not fighting any war here. All they are trying to do, give a more ad-infested piece of software free of recognisable cost to consumers. So, stop painting that google is on a war or something. We all know that most of the crappy software out there can be done with more ads.
FTFY. Don't delude yourself that Google gives a crap about you, or making functional software for free. They care about slamming their ads in front of you, and hiding the actual cost of their services behind that "free" moniker.
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Indeed. If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product...
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They care about slamming their ads in front of you, and hiding the actual cost of their services behind that "free" moniker.
And butt-raping any privacy you think you might still have.
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Except the Chinese are playing Go.
The sad thing is that people see these as 6 different fronts. It's 2 fronts. Internet services and access. Google is smart in that they toss darts in the services area to see what sticks and run with it. If it doesn't stick, abandon, and try again.
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The biggest problem with Google is that they are not innovators ... just copycats.
To that, I and millions of others say... who cares? Why is copying or buying a concept such a bad thing? As long as they offer a service that is superior, why does it matter who came up with the original concept? Where would the GUI desktop be now if Apple hadn't "innovated" it from Xerox?
That's just the nature of competition and the free market. If the original idea isn't sufficient, why should I have to suffer it if there's a better executed "copy" from somewhere else? And if the copy isn't good, wou
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Uh, search...
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Is still not better, just what you're used to using now. Honestly, I flip between Google Search, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, depending on what I'm looking for, and how I'm feeling. Bing gives me most of what Google does, but with slightly different relevance algorithms, which is nice, since Google sometimes has a rather insane amount of irrelevant pages that have been GSEO (Google Search Engine Optimized), but they've not been BSEO'd. DuckDuckGo is a little quirky, but good.
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What a fucking loser.
Pot, meet kettle.
Re:Poor Liddle Dimwitted (Score:2)
Hmm, quite interesting. I still find the other AC's post hilarious on a hypocritical scale, but the added perspective is useful. Thank you for the considered, informative reply. While I freely admit I'm very tired of the prevailing attitude I constantly see around the 'net that Google can do no wrong, I certainly don't think them worse than most any other company, and better than a great deal of them. Constant demonstrated antipathy towards any company is rarely helpful.