Tom wants a Google 'unlocked handset' for the holidays because he thinks they could just break the telco monopoly on handset distribution and thus empower the Internet as the driver of mobile broadband now and forever.
I think it's inevitable for companies to try to get bigger and more powerful; the essential framework of capitalism is to create shareholder value, which means creating more profits. Regulation has to serve as a brake on that, and we've had little regulatory attention paid to tech companies.
Of course, what's yours is open and free as beer. What's Googles' is proprietary and for them to sell under terms they set. And, read the Chrome EULA. Anything you input via Chrome (say into IE) is theirs.
Comparison between Microsoft and Google makes no sense.
98% Of MIcrosoft Revenue is via partners. The partners bill on average $5 for every dollar Microsoft bill. Fortunes have been built in the MIcrosoft ecosystem. Fortunes built on IP and know how.
Google's business model is direct. Good, bad or otherwise, unless you work for Google, you are not going to pay your rent anywhere near the "eat or burn" Google business model. If one teaspoon full of IP appears that they do not control, they will dump GPL poison all over it to make sure you will never drink from that well again.
And the services model? Well frankly Google is so good at 'usability' there is very little room for 'experts' who can make a decent living showing people how to use Google. The fools who are helping companies install Google Search Appliance now will soon be looking for ways to send their kids to collage.
Maybe this is good, but plain and simple, it is not good for me.
Transitions in a market are always a challenge for the incumbent vendor, IMHO. They never know whether to simply cut and run to get a more innovative or at least more monetizable position, or to hunker down and milk the markets. Picking the best choice means forecasting how proactive buyers will be; how they'll judge future value propositions. With the economy still in transition it's hard to know what people will want in 2010. I do agree that IBM and others are looking much harder at professional services revenues, but I also think that they see services as a way to get payment for helping on a project that will then also involve the customer buying IBM products.
I think part of IBM's problem is trying to figure out what they want to be from time to time. They are killing the iSeries "midrange" system (a misnomer now as there are HUGE systems) one minute touting it the next. But as they move more and more into services why would they want to promote a server that runs and runs with VERY little intervention ?
Sadly, evil is in the eye of the beholder, and to quote Andrew Lloyd Weber "You talk of truth; is truth unchanging law? We all have truths; are mine the same as yours?" I suspect most of us do no evil by our own standards.
Just as an afterthought - I wonder what would happen if we just ignored some of the breakthroughs and moments of pure genius by Google and others. Maybe just once. What if the "new black" just fell on silence?
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
50 billion household devices will be on the Internet by 2020, according to Cisco. And we're hearing foreign governments are hacking our infrastructure. Surely our refrigerators are next!
YouTube's move to a partial pay-for-view model could help relieve a dearth of good new content but it could also complicate debates in many parts of the world over payment by content providers for delivery of their material to customers.
That's what Larry Page said on Google's earnings call, referring to the conjunction of mobile and the cloud. Well, let's chart it then! We need to be thinking about an Internet where 90% of our traffic goes to 70 destinations within 40 miles of us.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
EU operators are considering joining up to create a pan-European network to reduce competitive overbuild and cost. This might lower costs and focus operators on higher-level, more interesting services.
Google is reportedly working on a pair of Android glasses that will use a low-resolution built-in camera to monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings, and friends who might be nearby. Interested?
Google Maps 6.0 helps users navigate indoor locations like IKEA and airports. While this sounds good, Nicole fears it will also breed dumber humans who bump into each other a lot, or something.
Techies are going crazy over the possibility that Google might design and sell its own Android phone. Some writers say it's a very big deal. Reiter questions whether it will happen and, if it does, whether it even matters.
A survey by JD Powers found that customer interest in product features is lessening as phones evolve. Rather than features, price is driving purchases, and that change could have a dramatic impact on how IT departments secure these devices.
The Amazon smartphone rumor and the Apple mini-iPad rumor show that the mobile device giants think they have to be in all the device spaces to win. Why? Because the cloud can create an ecosystem where every device can cooperate to support the user, and if you don't supply all the devices you miss out on the total value.
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