Entrepreneur Watch

Google and the iPhone, Click Forensics

(Oct. 13, 2008) Think what you will about Google management, but it's not stupid.

Desipte the fact that Google is pushing the Android Gphone from T-Mobile, it's not afraid to make moves that can help competitors. 

Google has announced a localized ad system for the iPhone. Android just isn't there yet, and pundits keep predicting that it will have trouble competing with the iPhone, which has huge momentum. This helps keep the momentum going -- assuming its ad system is successful.

I've seen many companies refuse to develop programs for a competing system on the theory that they don't want to help make the competitor successful. Then they lose out when the other platform becomes successful. It helped Microsoft take over PC apps. Competitors refused to develop for Windows in the early days.

The alternate theory is that Google is using the iPhone to experiment with ads, hoping to work out the bugs and figure out how it's done. Then it can move the ad system to Android and get it right.

Either way, it's a smart move.

And in another move, it has partnered with click-fraud detection service Click Forensics, a firm it has fought with over the legitimacy of clicks on Google ads. A belated move, but also smart, one that can mollify advertisers that claim some of the clicks are not legitimate. 

Perhaps Google feels Click Forensics' system has improved, or thinks a partnership will help improve the system.

But it's also a good move.

Should mixed-race couples be allowed to marry?

I decided to try watching the new TV program, "Life on Mars," about a cop who gets hit by a car and is somehow (or is he??) magically transported back to 1973 to solve old crimes. Wierd concept.

But I started falling asleep and muct have lapsed into a coma. Suddenly I found myself in 1973 watching a TV commercial. In it, a little white girl ran up to her mother, excited to show her a new Fairy Tale book she had gotten from school.

"Mommy," she said. "I just learned that a black princess could grow up and marry a white prince! And I could grow up and marry a black prince!"

Her mother was appalled at the disgusting things they were trying to teach her innocent little daughter. She knew this dangerous tendency of "tolerance" would affect her children! They were trying to turn her daughter into someone who would marry a black man! Her baby!

Then an announcer came on and said this is the kind of thing that would happen if interracial marriage were to be allowed. And nobody would be able to stop it. So we should vote to support a ban on interracial marriage.

Where am I?, I thought. Alabama in 1973?

Then I woke up and realized that I was in California in 2008, and the ad was about Proposition 8, which would ban same-sex marriage so that our daughters don't grow up to be lesbians.

Phew. What a relief. It wasn't bigotry after all.

Google earnings estimates 3Q 2008: are the analysts still smoking?

Google stock is being hammered like every other company in the world's stock markets. About $3.38 as I write this. Yahoo Finance says the mean target stock price among 29 analysts is $608.07. But then, they've been rating the stock a buy for months. 

Most analysts rate the stock a "Buy" (14 Strong Buy, 18 Buy, 2 Hold) with target prices ranging from 475 to 785. But a couple analysts are getting more skittish, according to a CNET article published yesterday.

...analyst George Askew and Reed Meyer of Stifel Nicolaus lowered their Google price target to $525 a share from $600 a share, as well as cut the earnings estimates for 2008 and 2009

Google reports earnings on Oct. 16.

I would bet that the decreasing price has little or nothing to do with expectations over earnings. Google doesn't like to give guidance, but lets the stock react positively or negatively once earnings are announced. 

That means nobody, including the analysts, (did I just call the analysts nobody?) really knows how well Google did last quarter. It's guesswork. That doesn't stop the analysts from trying the near-impossible. Forbes says Wall Street is expecting earnings of about $4.81 per share, compared to $4.63 per share in the second quarter.

Will Google rise above the downturn because its ads are cheap so advertisers are focusing their efforts there? Or is it being sucked into the morass started by the Wall Street crises?

Better yet, does Google control how well it will do? One former competitor told me a month ago that Google can tweak its ad system to increase or decrease revenues by increasing or decreasing the number of ads it shows. This former exec said that Google has been reducing the number of ads, willing to take a hit in order to gain more goodwill with users.

And he thought it was a good idea. Google needed a little more goodwill. He didn't say this, but perhaps Google is interested in not seeming too powerful right now, with its ad deal with Yahoo hitting skepticism from everybody and their little sisters.

I can't vouch for that. I haven't had a chance to ask Google about it yet.

Bottom line of this column: I haven't a clue.

Xooglers: Where are those ex-Googlers now?

Esquire magazine has a long piece on the Google Diaspora, with the tag line: The next big idea to come out of Google may not come out of Google.

It seems to me that many words have been spilled over the issue of whether too many people have bailed out of Google, taking their vested stock and trying new things. 

Esquire has a list of 35 former senior Googlers who have quit to start their own businesses, or invest in others who have.

One Xoogler, who may have coined the phrase, started a blog, but hasn't posted in eight months, and went six months before that without a post. I guess the charm of being an Xoogler has worn as thin as a paper cut.

Last March, Valleywag gave space for angry ex-Googlers to vent, although some of it just sounds like sour grapes.

Pundits have been warning for years that when the vesting started, Google would lose talent. But they warned about that happening at Microsoft two decades ago, and it didn't happen until around 2000. So why does it seem to be happening at Google?

Is working at Google such a pain that nobody wants to stay once they cash in? Is this a modern phenomenon of really young people who think that if Sergey and Larry struck a diamond mine, they can too? Or is it much ado about not much?

The Esquire list doesn't say what the Xooglers' titles were, so it's hard to say how senior these folks are. I mean, google has 20,000 employees, so losing 35 of them is not too surprising.

One thing, though, I can't say any of them are helping revolutionize the internet yet. Remember Cuil? It had its 15 seconds of fame. Things move faster on the internet.

The Esquire article starts out with a meeting at a VC firm, Merus Capital, founded by two Xooglers. In it, one co-founder is deriding the other's interest in funding a company with a new ... Web browser!

'      "You get two pieces of value," Dempsey says. "One is . . ."

I can't write down exactly what Dempsey says now, because that would violate the terms of confidentiality I agreed to in order to attend this meeting. I can say that as soon as Dempsey finishes describing the browser's first supposedly distinctive feature, Ullah laughs and says, derisively, "Shades of 1998."   

'

The author, Luke Dittrich, doesn't seem to have paid much attention to the second feature. His mind wandered. But he managed to refocus for the final verdict: "Some clown could build this for a Mozilla plug-in!" He shakes his head. "We're not meeting with them."

I've talked to a few Xooglers, and they seemed pretty happy with their stints there. I quoted some of the observations of one, Chris Sacca, in one of my columns about the Google Gphone.

Sometimes, there's a synergy that verges on magic at great companies. And sometimes that magic does not travel with individual executives who leave the bubble.

But I'm interested in the stories of Xooglers. Contact me if you know of any.

And let me know if you have the answer to the other question that bugs me. How do you pronounce Xoogler, anyway?

AIG: Rampant greed and hubris

    It's difficult to fathom the abundance of greed and the depth of hubris at AIG. There's an article in the New York Times outlining the spending habits of American International Group, which has come to light now that we taxpayers have been so kind as to bail out the company.

It's a frightening, maddening story.

AFTER AIG got an $85 billion bailout in taxpayer money, its insurance subsidiary spent $442,000 treating its sales agents to a week at an exclusive resort in Monarch Beach, California. That includes $24,000 in spa charges.

Also:

the former A.I.G. executive who led the London-based division whose implosion is largely blamed for the insurance giant’s downfall, Joseph J. Cassano, continues to receive $1 million a month from the company, on top of the $280 million he received in the last eight years.

 

There's no sense of fair play that says executives should decrease their outrageous pay even as they drive the company toward bankruptcy:

And even after A.I.G. reported $5 billion in losses in the final quarter of 2007, its chief executive at the time, Martin J. Sullivan, argued before a compensation committee that executives should receive performance bonuses. He received $5 million.

Meanwhile, the company was hiding its problems from its own auditors.

An accountant, Joseph St. Denis, who had been hired by A.I.G. to address accounting problems, was not given access to the very unit whose losses ... led to the bailout ... Mr. Cassano told Mr. St. Denis, according to testimony, that he had been “deliberately excluded” from the evaluation of AIG Financial Products, to avoid “polluting the process.” Mr. St. Denis resigned in protest.

This comes a day after Lehman's CEO, Richard S. Fuld Jr., refused to accept responsibility for the firm's bankruptcy, and insisted golden parachutes and hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for top executives was justified.

What executives today don't get is how pissed off Americans are over outrageously excessive executive salaries and inability to accept responsibility for their actions. I remember when Intel CEO Andy Grove said in the late 1980s that he was embarrassed over his salary of $300,000 and groused that other firms paid their executives even more.

There is absolutely no way that any executive in the world is worth 10s of millions of dollars in annual compensation. I've met many of them. They aren't that good. It's easy to find qualified replacements if they care to look. Sergey and Larry make $1 apiece. they already made their fortunes off the IPO.

But big corporations feel they have to go for big names to run their companies, and that means big salaries.

Today's executives have become so lost in their own greed, they think they live in another world. America has become a caste society in which corporate executives see themselves as an elite, immune from the standards that apply to the rest of us.

I mean, sure, expensive retreats are common for top salespeople. But don't these executives have the sense to cancel the deal this one time, after driving the company to the brink of bankruptcy and getting a taxpayer bailout? Do they really think we serfs see them as kings, the ruling elite? Or is it gods?

And now, executives and Republicans across the country are going to cry about government regulations that are going to strangle them like a barbed wire noose.

They have nobody to blame but themselves. They have proved that unregulated markets do not correct themselves. Completely unregulated markets brought us the novels of Charles Dickens. Now we will probably swing the regulatory pendulum too far in the opposite direction, and that's good.

It's the only way to restore some sanity to business.

At Google, is advertising evil? Or just for losers?

I've always wondered why Google, a company that makes all its money from advertising services, rarely advertises itself.

Well, in fact, the company does advertise -- mostly online. Its ad budget is about $20 million a year, not much for a company its size. It has shunned TV advertising like the medium is good for little more than turning people into stupid zombies.

Oh, yeah. It is.

But the Wall Street Journal reports that Google is reconsidering its aversion to advertising: 

But in recent months some of the Internet company's executives have been pushing for the company to overcome its aversion to paid advertising. That has created some conflict within Google, which is maturing and looking to reinvigorate its slowing growth.

I'm not so sure about the slowing growth "problem." In the quarter ended in Junw 2008, revenue was up 39% over a year ago. That doesn't seem to signal panic time for a company with a $21 billion annual revenue run rate.

The Journal cites sources who say some people in the company raised the possibility of advertising some Google products (presumably other than search) during the Olympics coverage. However, "The idea didn't get past Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who felt a splashy television ad wouldn't fit with Google's image." 

I wonder just how ads would hurt Google's "image." I mean, aside from the stupidity thing. Is it evil to interrupt the Games with commercials? Do only losers have to advertise? One has to admit that Microsoft's ads to counter Apple's ads leave the impression that TV ads are just a way to convince people that a loser OS is actually better than EVERYONE thinks.

But offline advertising can't be intrinsically evil. I mean, Google has programs to put AdSense advertisers in TV spots, newspapers and other offline media.

Losers.

A poke in the Evil Eye! Google Chrome is losing market share

I was reading an uplifting article in InfoWeek, "Google Chrome's shine is fading," saying that the Evil Empire is getting a poke in the Evil Eye. A study of visits to Web sites by researcher Net Applications shows that Google Chrome is losing market share already. Hah!

I quote:

During the first day of its release Sept. 2, Google Chrome rocketed to 1% of the market, Net Applications said. Since then, the upstart browser has fallen to 0.77% as of last week, with the losses shared evenly between IE and Firefox.

That's really great! I mean, beta version 0.2 of Chrome which, after one day on the market, achieved nearly one-sixth of Apple's market share and 1/20 of Firefox's share, is slipping!  (Firefox, 19.42% and Apple's Safari, 6.73%.) That's another quote, btw.

I'll bet Sergey and Larry are frantic and taking it out on somebody. Probably beating the Chrome engineers with USB 2.0 cables demanding to know what went wrong. It's a serious setback in Google's quest for World Domination.

Net Applications knows what went wrong: 

I quote again:

"Net Applications believes fewer people are using Chrome out of concern with the amount of user data Google would gather through the browser."

Damn straight. You need more proof?  Listen to some of the comments on the article:

I quote:

says CHEE: google is being evil with chrome. they are tracking EVERYTHING. I am staying away from chrome. IE8 is awesome and good in perf.

Of course, I don't know why Chee would trust Microsoft more.

OK, I'm going to stop saying these are quotes.

Says rajiv: Chrome indeed seems much faster, but i hadn't considered the possible privacy issues. maybe i'll just use firefox

I don't know why rajiv would trust Firefox, either.

Says Turaxm25: I ran chrome for few days and thought it was a really good browser, very fast. However, i came back to IE7 when i heard about privacy issues and google gathering information. giving it a few thought before going back.

I'm sure lots of people wouldn't touch Chrome if it it came with a free Macbook Pro with a 17-in screen and a 2.5GHz microprocessor and a Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel) and a HP Photosmart C7280 All-in-One Printer, Scanner, Copier and a AirPort Extreme Base Station with Gigabit Ethernet and a Time Capsule - 1 TB and a Apple TV with 160GB drive and a bunch of other stuff with an estimated total cost of $8,639.33. 

 I might, though. 

And my birthday is coming up.

And, Hail to the gods of World of Warcraft, Google is going to come along and make all that stuff cheaper by offloading a bunch of stuff to the cloud and running everything on its own computers. And they're going to make all the world's information available to everyone. And they never sneak ads into search results or sell our information to anyone. Right,

You think companies actually have ideals? Why should they? Where's the benefit? Happy users? That's a customer service issue, and that's an expense item. Which means expendable. Idealistic companies never make money. Google does. Quod erat demonstrandum.

These are tough times and Google has to try to convince shareholders that it's going to meet margin goals and will keep its stock price up no matter what. Like that's worked anyway.

That's a corporation; why would it exist to do anything else? What's the point? Because information is important to share with the world? You believe that Sergey and Larry just think that's the way the world ought to be? I might think about doing something like that if I had the money, and you might, but we're not big corporations, we're just underpaid hacks who don't get billions in stock options and have to work for a living.

Google is getting so big and collecting so much information, it must be evil. 

Listen to what Randall Stross, who just wrote a book on Google, says in an op-ed piece. "The outstanding question that we must consider is whether a privately controlled storehouse of so much personal information constitutes a concentration of power that begs for public oversight."

Oversight, yeah, that's the ticket. I'm sure we can trust gum'mint overseers more than we can trust Google.

Let's face it, we all know corporations are evil. My momma taught me that when I was just knee-high to giant banana slug. Sergey and Larry are out for one thing only, to make tons of money and keep their shareholders happy. End of story goodbye the end.

Of course, I've never read a story about Google violating its privacy policy, but that's the mainstream press for you, they've all sold out to Big Corporate America and don't report the real story. 

And I don't trust bloggers, either.

It's all corporate spin control, like those commercials showing how Chevron is actually a very environmentally friendly company and restores wetlands and ozone holes and would never spill a drop in a zillion years.

Do they expect us to believe that cockamamie -- cockamaimie? cocamaimi? No, that one looks like a tropical soda -- stuff they feed us?

Oh, sure, the company says it will use our information to improve its algorithms, to give us better search results and anticipate our needs, but who believes that?  

You know Google has got to be selling information about you to advertisers and probably sitting around chuckling over the stuff you search on.

And they're probably selling information to Homeland Security about how you once smoked pot even though you didn't inhale and you didn't like it anyway and how you distrust Republicans AND Democrats and how you just occasionally -- even rarely -- check out porn sites and you like war games like World of Warcraft even though you've never actually thought about blowing anything up and you certainly never told anyone about it.

But I digress.

Right at this moment, I'm sure that some pasty-faced engineer at Google is reading all my email through a secret deal with Firefox and Microsoft that they would rather not have to keep paying for and following my surf habits and reporting back to Somebody in the Government.

Sure, maybe they don't have time to watch all 1.463632361  billion  people surfing the Web at once. Or read all that information. Or care.

But I'm sure they're watching me.

--- Joe Bob Brandt

Richard calls me his Evil Twin Skippy, but we're only cousins

Justice Dept. about to take on Google/Yahoo deal? Google's Craig Silverstein argues back.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that DOJ is  showing "signs the government may be preparing to recommend an antitrust challenge to the deal."

You have to be a subscriber to read the full article, but the top is here.

PC World adds: "10 members of the House of Representatives Judiciary Antitrust Task Force wrote their own letter to the DOJ, urging the agency to "closely review" the ad deal."

This is a tough issue. Google dominates online advertising, so there is natural resistance to such a deal. But it's designed to help save Yahoo. Yahoo will still run its own ads, but Google's will be added to the mix, and are likely to be more profitable. Quite simply, Google ads are better at relevancy.

Google and Yahoo do not at this point need DOJ permission. they voluntarily submitted the deal to DOJ to try and head off problems. But DOJ could try to stop it by filing a suit.

Google has created a Web site making its arguments. The summary argument:

This is a non-exclusive deal that will strengthen Yahoo!.

Ad prices will continue to be set by competitive auction.

The deal is win-win for consumers, advertisers and publishers: more and better ads.

Some of the details, according to the site:

The deal will let Yahoo! show more ads on pages where it previously showed no ads or only a few ads

Yahoo won't be able to just pick the ads with the highest bids:

Under the terms of our agreement Yahoo! won't be able to see the current auction prices for Google ads, and Google won't be able to see Yahoo!'s prices.

And it takes to task -- really, seems to imply that the methodology was either naive or rigged -- the study that newspapers and other organization point to saying ad prices will rise. It fails to consider the fact that ad prices are set by auction, that it mistakenly claims Yahoo will be able to see which ads are priced higher, and that it "mistakenly assumes that Yahoo! will serve Google ads for as many of its search queries as possible, contradicting Yahoo!'s own statements to the contrary.

There are plenty of advocates againt it. The PC World article reports on one:

The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), a privacy and consumer advocacy group, on Thursday sent a letter to Senator Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat and chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, asking the lawmaker to call on the DOJ to either oppose the deal or put significant conditions on the Google and Yahoo partnership.

Regulation-happy Europeans are especially wary of the deal, including the International Advertising Association, the EU, and the World Association of Newspapers. Although IAA admits it doesn't know the specifics of the deal, its main argument seems to be: "In principle and in practice, monopolistic media control and pricing has not been good for the industry." 

Now, come on. Shouldn't you at least get the details before you start filing complaints? This is absurd.

Wired has a brief article on the IAA complaint, plus links to other articles about complainers. Ironically, I had to close a pop-up ad for MSN in order to see the article. And people wonder why Google ads are so much more effective?

Much of the criticism is disingenuous. Back when I was covering Microsoft and its own problems with DOJ, Microsoft was arguing that a monopoly is not illegal in the U.S., only abuse of monopoly power is illegal. Now that Microsoft argues Google should be stopped from expanding its legally-obtained monopoly, it should show us where the illegal part comes in.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Google's Craig Silverstein, who has been with the company from the beginning, what he thought of the issue of ad prices going up if Google dominates too much. The theory is that if there's only one significant auction, people will bid higher, because everyone goes to that auction. 

Silverstein doesn't buy that argument:

"That argument makes no sense to me at all. I wonder how they justify it. The way auction systems work is supply and demand. [Having more auctions] doesn't increase the supply [of places to advertise.] This is, like,  very basic economics."

He notes that the argument seems to be saying competition will be lower on the less popular ad system. But that's because, he argues,  the less effective one doesn't give you the retun on your money to justify higher prices. People only bid higher on Google ads because they get their money's worth. "Even when ads are more expensive, they more than pay for themselves."

Essentially he's saying: If you want to compete in online advertising, make your ads more relevant and worth more money! Are Microsoft and Yahoo listening?

The most interesting point to me is that if this deal is blocked, it won't hurt Google at all. It will hurt an already-suffering Yahoo. Maybe the deal would even teach Yahoo a thing or two about how to run an effective advertising system.

In the meantime, Yahoo has released details of its new display advertising platform, called APT, to simplify the process of buying display ads. NYT has an article. It's skeptical of the benefit.

Stats and reviews of the Google (Android) phone from around the world

UPDATE:

Some stats and reviews:

You can get the list of features from T-Mobile here.

CNET does a comparison to the iPhone and talks about what's different.

Some highlights:

"It turns out that the G1 does not have a 3.5-mm headset jack, which is a big downside considering it does have a music player with access to the Amazon MP3 store. And because it doesn't have stereo Bluetooth either, you might have to cough out some extra cash for a headphone adapter."

"the G1 has something called one-click contextual search, which lets you search your contacts as well as the Web just by typing in a few letters and hitting Enter."

"Another important factor: The G1 has copy and paste."

"G1 has e-mail and instant messaging with special preference given to Gmail and Google Talk (To answer one of the comments, the G1 will also offer IM for AIM, Yahoo, and MSN)"

"if you're a Gmail fan, you'll love the push Gmail on the G1. Also unlike the iPhone, the G1 does have multimedia messaging, plus you can multitask applications while chatting. "

"Here's where the G1 really makes a difference. It comes with Google Maps Street View built-in, providing you with a street view of any location covered with Google Maps. It also comes with compass mode with the scene on the screen moving as you do."

"One of the big news of the day is that the G1 is the first phone to offer a mobile version of Amazon's MP3 store, providing a viable alternative to the iTunes store on the iPhone."

"The G1 comes with 1GB of internal memory, which is pretty small for a smart phone, but it does come with an expansion slot. "

"G1 does have voice dialing capabilities."

First impressions from Walt Mossberg:

"the first real competitor to the iPhone."

"the G1 complements its touch screen with a physical keyboard, the lack of which has made the iPhone a non-starter for some users. ... The keys are a bit flat, and you have to reach your right thumb around a bulging portion of the phone’s body to type, but it’s a real keyboard. "

"I found typing on this keyboard to be OK, but not great."

"it is tightly tied to Google’s web-based email, contacts and calendar programs. In fact, you must have a Google (GOOG) account to use the phone, and can only synchronize the phone’s calendar and address book with Google online services. "

"Unlike the iPhone, it doesn’t work with Microsoft Exchange, and it can’t physically be synced with a PC-based calendar or contacts program, like Microsoft Outlook."

"It’s stubby and chunky, nearly 30% thicker and almost 20% heavier than the iPhone."

"Programs appear in a virtual drawer you slide open via a tab at the bottom of the screen, and notifications of new messages and the like can be read by sliding the top bar of the screen down."

"You can view a portion of a page, and use a zoom control and finger-dragging to see the rest, or you can view the whole page in miniature, as on the iPhone. In the latter mode, however, you can’t simply use Apple’s technique of tapping or “pinching” to zoom in on a portion of a page. You must move around a virtual lens to pick out a part of the page on which to focus."

"The G1 has a couple of other things the iPhone omits: copy and paste functionality and a so-called MMS program, which sends photos to other phones without using email."

"It also gives you far more flexibility in organizing your desktop, or home screen, than the iPhone, or almost any phone I’ve seen. In addition to placing icons for programs there, you can place everything from individual contacts, music playlists, folders, web pages, and more."

"G1 lacks a built-in video player — you have to download one from the third-party software store."

"it lacks the iPhone’s ability to change the orientation of a web page or photo by just turning the phone. You also can’t move through groups of photos by just “flicking,” as on the iPhone."

"unlike Apple’s product, the G1 has a removable battery."

From the Telegraph in the UK:

"The G1’s user interface is slick and simple, and provides one-touch access to Google’s search engine. And, unlike Apple’s iPhone, it’s able to run applications simultaneously"

"The built-in compass means users will quickly and easy be able to orient themselves when in an unfamiliar area"

"Sergey Brin and Larry Page, said that they hoped future versions of the operating system would offer really clever location-specific information and services, and new applications that expand the mobile internet experience."

"Some of the applications that have already been built for the Android platform, [include] a carbon-footprint tracker and song lyrics generator"

Telegraph also does some side-by-side comparisons with iPhone. (158 grams vs. 133 grams for the iphone, screen 3.2 in. vs. 3,5 in...)

From phones review:

"The downside of the G1 Android phone is that it doesn’t have stereo Bluetooth and it won’t do video capture, you will require a Gmail account and the weirdest thing is that they are saying that the G1 Android phone will not be sold at stores outside of a 2.5 mile radius of T-Mobiles 3G coverage area."

From Mobile Burn:

"Since the display makes use of capacitive touchscreen^(INFO) technology, it can be activated by very light touches, something that all of HTC's Windows Mobile smartphones have been, thus far, unable to claim. When the device is held horizontally and the display is slid up, the G1's full QWERTY keyboard is revealed in a way that many T-Mobile Sidekick users will appreciate."

"The keyboard on the T-Mobile G1 is very spacious, offering 5 full rows of keys in a very traditional layout that most everybody should be familiar with. Another Sidekick like touch is the G1's trackball, which eases one-handed navigation chores."

From Times Online in the UK:

"The T-Mobile G1 is great. The iPhone is better."

" Its main plus points are that the G1 happily steals the best features of the iPhone and Blackberry ... It has the easy-to-navigate and intuitive touchscreen, like the iPhone. But like the Blackberry it also has a qwerty keyboard, which slides out, and a “trackball” which helps you navigate around the screen."

"at first glance, you feel that more could have been done to make this a beautiful looking gadget. It feels and looks plastic and clunky. Choosing the G1 over the iPhone is the equivalent of choosing comfortable slippers over designer shoes."

A Quick Review from Pocket Lint:

"The good:	Open platform OS, HSDPA
The bad:	Handset isn't the sexiest you'll have seen, no cut and paste, no Flash video support, no flash for the camera, no dedicated headphone jack"

Why the Google/HTC/T-Mobile phone makes a difference.

The G1 phone is here, and I expect a lot of people will soon be singing its shortcomings. Neither Google nor HTC are insanely great designers that wow you with their imagination like Steve Jobs does. 

As I've said before, the real importance of this phone is to offer an open design, to let people create new applications and let users decide what apps to install, rather than letting Apple or Verizon or whoever dictate what we can and cannot have.

I was trying to find the location of a theater in San Francisco the other night and it took so long for my Verizon phone to launch VZ Navigator that I stumbled upon the theater before I got it working. And the phone dupports every online email service except Gmail.

Just having a phone with my Google services almost makes it worth signing up for T-Mobile.

Quite simply, this phone will be as popular among heavy Google users as an oasis in the desert. It will grow from there.

I'll dig up some highlights from the reviewers shortly, after an appointment I have to run to.

Cisco buys Jabber, attacks the Tower of Internet Babel

This was a smart move by Cisco. Jabber IM users can exchange messages with all the major IM players, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple. The article doesn't say if it's compatible with AOL's IM. The growth in IM will be in services that allow cross-communication, moving the world toward a single standard.

Or all the systems will work out cross-communications capabilities. I don't IM (I know, I'm backwards) so I don't know where the standards are right now.

Cisco already owns PostPath, an online collaboration software company. We need standards there, too -- among calendaring systems, for example. I like that when someone with Google calendar sends me an invite (via email) to an event, it appears on both our calendars as soon as I accept. That should happen with all calendars and email.

Time for the Tower of Internet Babel to fall!

Do not fear the Google

Randall Stross at the New york Times has a really good article on all the paranoia about the Google-Yahoo deal.

Everyone from Microsoft to newspaper publishers to ad agencies keep complaining that it will concentrate more power in Google's hands and either raise ad prices or knock out all profitability in advertising.

Says Stross:

 Google’s critics — led by Microsoft, the major search-engine rival that was left out — seem to sense that this pact is a chance to depict Google as a price-controlling monster.

I feel for newspapers and their loss of revenues. But Google is not at fault. They need to start figuring out how to make money from online advertising to replace their declining revenues from print advertising.

Newspapers are probably more devastated by Craig's List than by Google. Should we crack down on Craig Newmark?

As Stross points out, Google's ads are set by auction. This deal was created to help save Yahoo. Google will supply Yahoo with ads it would not have gotten otherwise, and the ads will be more relevant and generate higher revenues to Yahoo.

It's interesting to note that the only search company that has gained market share since Google started is Ask.com, which has an advertising deal with Google.

I've heard the argument that fewer auctions mean higher bids, but I don't buy it. Sure, you can get a cheaper ad placed in an auction that doesn't work as well as Google's, but it won't give you the same returns. Buyers can decide where they get the best value for their money.

If Microsoft (or Yahoo, for that matter) can figure out how to make their ads more effective, it will have nothing to worry about.

Our scary economy

This article in the New York Times is one of the scariest stories about the state of the U.S. economy around. 

Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, laid out the potentially devastating ramifications of the financial crisis before congressional leaders on Thursday night:

As Senator Christopher J. Dodd, ... chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, put it ... the congressional leaders were told “that we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”

This is beginning to sound like the start of a new Great Depression.

On the same day, columnist Thomas L. Friedman reminds us of one of Ronald Reagan's "funny" jokes.

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ”

All I can say is: Help!

Predictably, there are plenty of conservative columnists, including David Brooks, who assure us that lack of regulation did NOT lead to the current crisis.

In the first place, the idea that our problems stem from light regulation and could be solved by more regulation doesn’t fit all the facts. The current financial crisis is centered around highly regulated investment banks, while lightly regulated hedge funds are not doing so badly. Two of the biggest miscreants were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which, in theory, “were probably the world’s most heavily supervised financial institutions,” according to Jonathan Kay of The Financial Times.

Sure, but the the problem started with the mortgage lending industry, with no controls over whom it lent money to, and now taxpayers have to pay billions -- or trillions -- of dollars to bail out these free enterprises. 

AIG unwisely got into a new type of "insurance" in which it had no expertise, the credit default swap market. As a former money manager from Drexel wrote: Nobody knows this market’s real size, or who owes what to whom, because there is no central clearinghouse or regulator for it.

And we get to bail out AIG, too.

After years of resisting proposed government regulations to improve gas mileage, auto makers are now suffering because they don't have enough high-mileage and hybrid vehicles on the market. The regulations were justified on environmental and oil dependency grounds, and contrary to the auto industry's insistence, would NOT have hurt them in the long run, but would have given them a head start in the right direction.

I know Silicon Valley loves to be libertarian, but I like to remind people that if they'd like to see truly unregulated business, they should read Charles Dickens. Child labor, debtor's prisons, abuse of workers and corporate finance, no environmental controls.

I was at a political conference a year ago, in which Tony Perkins of "Always On" professed the dogma of government-can't-do-anything right. "I know the folks at Google, and believe me, they didn't get where they are with government help."

Oh, no? I was compelled to stand up and remind him that the research for Google was started under the National Science Foundation-funded "Digital Libraries" program at Stanford.

The U.S. government created the Internet, DOD funding kick-started Silicon Valley, and new regulations bailed us out of the Great Depression. Government funding is now kick-starting sustainable energy programs, and wihtout environmental laws, we'd look more like China.

I remember an article I did for Business Week decades ago about J.R. Simplot, the Idaho potato king who made a fortune selling frozen fries to McDonald's. A shareholder once asked him when he was going to stop polluting the Snake River, and he replied, "When the government makes me stop."

Yes, there are many things governments shouldn't do, and there are a lot of programs we should get rid of, including subsidies and tax breaks to oil producers and corn farmers.

We need smart government regulations with smart politicians to enforce them. The problem isn't government regulation, it's the system that regulates. We need reform, an end to earmarks and the ability to end old programs that no longer work.

Wouldn't now be a good time to start thinking about how that might be done?

Jeb Bartlet on Barack Obama

One of the most interesting columns Maureen Dowd didn't write was on Sunday, when she asked Aaron Sorkin to conjure up a conversation between West Wing's Jeb Bartlet and Barack Obama. 

He brilliantly articulates what most Obama supporters are feeling right now:

OBAMA What would you do?

BARTLET GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

It makes one think that the Obama campaign should hire Sorkin as a speech writer.

Google phone at $199 and what it really needs to be a success

UPDATE: The phone has now been announced, and it costs $179, not $199. More info here. 

The Wall Street Journal online has cited sources saying the Google phone will retail for $199, will be introduced September 23.

The data plan will be "aggresively priced," fitting in with Google's goal of getting more people online as cheaply as possible.

Also, according to the Journal, "Google is indirectly helping to reduce T-Mobile's costs by contributing resources toward development of the phone, the people said."

I like that part. Google has deep pockets and is willing to sacrifice profits to get an open systems phone on the market. 

Telegraph in the UK also says it will contain a GPS chip. 

The Independent has a video of the phone being demonstrated at a London conference.

WashingtonPost.com runs a skeptical article from mocoNews saying that it will disappoint when compared to the iPhone. The evidence is screwy, though. They cite an analyst saying people don't buy operating systems, they buy products. Duh. It's the OS that makes the product.

They also say that Google is the one with the brand name, and quote a wireless executive as saying "We can't say it's a Google phone," making marketing a problem. That's silly, since all the reports say the phone will include Google's name on it. That will add cachet.

Another analyst says he was not sure the phone was "significantly better" than the iPhone, which is an absurd argument. Windows is significantly inferior to the Mac OS, but seems to sell OK.

Still, it's good to set expectations low. As in politics, the winner is the one that beats expectations.

But here's the real competition: Whichever phone appears first on Verizon's network will win. 

The iPhone is only available on AT&T's network, Google is only available on T-Mobile right now. That gives the iPhone the advantage.

If Verizon adopts Android, it will have a chance to get established among non AT&T users. If Verizon goes with the iPhone first, it will be harder for Android phones to gain traction.

When it first came out, "sources" said that AT&T had the exclusive rights for five years, implying that would last until 2012. But an article in USAToday said that because of some subsidies AT&T paid to Apple, "AT&T got a year extension, into 2010, on its exclusive distribution deal with Apple, people familiar with the matter say. Sources asked to not be named because the terms are confidential." 

The real battle will be between Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt, trying to get Verizon and other carriers to buy in. Verizon will probably wait until it sees how well Android does. If sales are decent, it might want to grab Android before AT&T's exclusivity ends.

I wonder: When in 2010?

Demo of the Google phone

A Google executive apparently gave a sneak preview of the google phone from HTC at a developer's conference in London yesterday.

The Independent has a video of the demonstration. 

It appears to have touch-screen features modeled after the iPhone. the chances of it being as sleek and cool as the iPhone are on a par with those of Sarah Palin turning out to be a brilliant strategist in foreign policy.

But the importance of the iPhone is not in how sleek it is, or whether HTC sells a lot of them. The importance is its open system approach. Google is trying to open up the cellular industry, to break the control mobile carriers have on what we buy, on what applications we get, and on locking us into contracts when we get a new phone.

On that front, I believe the Google Phone will be groundbreaking. I certainly hope so.

Another item that caught my attention is an article from IDG published in the New York Times online about Google linking up with satellite company O3b network "to bring cheaper, high-speed wireless Internet access to areas unlikely to see investments in fiber infrastructure." O3b stands for "other 3 billion," a reference to the world's population that still can't access the Internet.

It all falls under the pledge to organize and make available all the world's information. Sure, it's legitimate to say that these ventures are also intended to bring Google more revenues. Google isn't a philanthropy; it has Google.org for that work. But I believe the company when it says that it wants to advance the Internet and make it available to as many people as possible. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin really believe in that quest.