Google's replacement of CEO Schmidt by founder Page has a lot of Valley types agog with expectations of a renewed 'startup' mindset. But the Google of today can't be a startup, and it may well be that chasing the next Internet fad is the wrong approach for the company.
Me too, Magnetic; Google has had its issues and created its share of controversies, but it's also been a pioneer in a lot of spaces and a central part of the success of the online model. We need it to continue.
I'd sympathize with Googlers who long for the original startup atmosphere at Google, but even if they have one of the founders back at the helm, there's no chance that things will be the same again. Growth in size makes a very big impact on a company's culture. It might explain why Google's been copying successful business models (and sadly, failing) instead of innovating. And they won't size the company down just to get back to startup mode, would they? I do hope that Page's mindset has been adjusted to view the company as it now is.
I'm still on the fence with respect to the shareholder value of Android; it's open source and not a direct revenue stream for Google but it does build an open ecosystem for mobile to compete with Apple's closed one, which helps to defend Google's web space. Still, you can't win by defending.
Social networking at this point is also a question mark for me. It's not that the idea is bad in isolation as much as that we're not in isolation; we have Facebook and Twitter. It was far easier for Facebook or Twitter to jump in when MySpace had not achieved wide success and was faltering in momentum, but harder for Google to do that now because it is harder to build the community itself, and social networks aren't about software they're about community. The software only mediates the community.
I do agree that we'll have to watch developments, though, and I suspect Page will be under pressure to come out with SOMETHING soon.
Market capitalization of their company is absolutely the duty of the CEO of Google, and for the company as a public entity. It is obvious that Google has made some web-product blunders (i.e. Dodgeball, Jaiku, Nexus One, and of course Wave) over the years under the executive supervision of Eric Schmidt, it needs to start capitalizing on alternative products that offer real shareholder value.
Examples of positive shareholder value for the company; the release of their Android OS on various vendor mobile phones, their successful mobile advertising revenue generation (an up-and-coming growing market) after their aquisition of AdMob. Larry Page needs to launch products that will make shareholders happy, and keep users happy. Their product blunder after blunder will not only disappoint investors, but it will ultimately result in harming their brand if people stop paying attention to products they might feel are doomed to become abandonware.
While we can shrug off the idea that Google will never enter the social networking space it's worth noting that last September Eric Schmidt was quoted in The Wall Street Journal and Reuters claiming Google will be launching "Google Me", a web-product that I can only assume will directly attempt to compete with Facebook that introduces online search, video, and maps.
This "Google Me" (great name by the way) sounds suspiciously like Google Talk so from the surface I don't see this as any kind of "Facebook Killer" as Wave attempted to be (and then served to only confuse users), but I do see it as a valid threat to the social networking establishment.
Will Mr.Page, as new CEO, continue with Google Me, succeed and in the end appease his shareholders? Will it end up with the same fate as Wave, or will it not even happy at all? Let's keep our eyes peeled for developments on this front.
Absolutely true Roshan; until the markets know where Page might take the company they'll be concerned that the direction might prove wrong. It's also generally true that any senior management change is kind of bad until proven otherwise.
Good point, and there's always the issue of future legal costs and in particular shareholder suits if Google strays too far from a track that looks to be good for the investors. Any uncertainty tends to be bad for a company's stock, and Google's is off a bit even today when the NASDAQ is up.
True, Tom. This is more evidence, if any were needed, that Google needs better PR. Surely, they can afford it. It's a long overdue expenditure on their part.
Who knows? A great PR team might even help Google avoid some of its mounting legal costs.
I think Larry needs to get out there and say something about Google's future under his leadership. He's letting himself be typecast by everyone in the media, and that creates a risk of expectations being set that he has neither the ability nor the will to fulfill.
Great post, Tom. Google can't hide behind its paper-machier PR anymore. As Nicole stated this week, playing catch-up in markets that are already established by smart first movers isn't the way to build a solid future.
Hopefully, Page will see the handwriting on the wall.
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.
What can users today do to protect their online privacy? The simplest and most obvious option is to not use the Internet – at all. However, once all digital information is consolidated over the Internet, trying to protect digital identity by simply unplugging from the Internet becomes impossible – a fact that has manifest implications for civil liberties, Saunders says.
By 2011 the number of Internet-connected sensors will exceed 1 trillion, making your chances of doing anything or going anywhere unnoticed pretty much zero. Saunders talks about how the 'sensortization' of the Internet is eliminating the traditional divide between online and offline populations.
The 20th Century Internet was characterized by the ability to interact with other people and information on the Internet largely without anyone knowing who you were. The Internet of this century, conversely, will be defined by identity. Saunders explains how Internet users are unwittingly contributing to the demise of the anonymous Internet.
Steve Saunders talks about the risks inherent in uncontrolled, widespread profiling of Internet users, and how one day this practice could form the basis of a new industry, the Outernet, which in economic terms will have outgrown the commercial value of the Internet itself.
Search companies and social networks are collecting incredibly detailed information about their users, says Steve Saunders, who predicts that these 'profiles' could one day become commodities to be bought and sold by companies on 'profile markets' or 'identity exchanges’ – the digital DNA equivalents of the financial and commodities exchanges on which stocks, oil, and gold are traded.
One of the most important Internet issues of all time is being ignored by the media. In this three-part video series Steve Saunders explains how search companies are turning the tables on their users by creating user profiles for financial gain, and how soon this trend will explode into full scale profiling.
Congrats to the best-selling author who persuaded Facebook to allow him to register an account as Salman, rather than under his "real" but never used name, Ahmed Rushdie.
Based on reactions in Nicole's Newsfeed, everyone hates this version of Facebook. This should matter to Facebook now that there's a real competitor on the scene named Google+.
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