Entrepreneur Watch

Google tries to conquer the world

I've been thinking about Google's potential lately.

With Google's purchase of YouTube indicating a new willingness to emphasize buying companies rather than spending so much time trying to duplicate the success of other pioneers, there are so many possibilities ahead.

So I thought I'd start with this scenario: What if Google manages to do everything it wants to do? After all, a generation ago, Microsoft came close to attaining that goal when its software almost completely took over the PC.

When I was at Businss Week, and I or others questioned Microsoft's ability to keep growing, Gates used to say, with his usual sarcasm: "Do you think there's a future in computer software? Just tell me if you think there's a future in software or not. If not, then we're in trouble."

Eric Schmidt might well ask if we think there's a future for the Internet.

An interesting article in Forbes magazine (which I found through Peter Dawson's posting at Google Blogoscoped) talks about Google's ambitions. Says Forbes reporter Quentin Hardy: 'Google Chief Schmidt thinks he can create a monster new computer industry, with Google at its core. "The number one goal is to build the most powerful platform to build these new businesses," Schmidt says. "This area will be as rich as what we saw in PCs." '

Quentin notes that Google has bought more than 50 small companies, and everybody seems to want to work at Google. Google knows how to take advantage of the Internet. Its goal is to build "little bits on an unimaginable scale" says Quentin.

The Internet is the Great Aggregator.

Now start with Google's mission statement, to "organize the world's information and make it universally accesible and useful." That statement encompasses more territory than Alexander the Great's ambition to conquer the world. It's not just search.

Google wants to organize YOUR information and make it accesible and useful. Hence applications like spreadsheets, word processing,  video posts and social networking, Picasa, Groups, and Blogger. Not all Google's efforts there are successful yet. Maybe Google will buy Typepad.

What esle? A database program? Presentation software? Desktop publishing software? And, eventually, a bunch of Macintosh software.

Google's advantage: Platypus (G/Drive), which means you never have to say you're sorry, but you lost your file. No worries about computer crashes. Microsoft needs to find a new business to get into.

Making information accessible and useful includes the ability to disseminate information. Gmail, of course. But also hardware: A Google-branded PC (small, efficient OS; built-in ability to work efficiently with Platypus; price tag $300 or less.) Cell phones with wi-fi connections (Google has reportedly allocated $100 million to create a Google cell phone, is working with Nokia.) How about a Google PDA (with email), a Google Book Reader, a Google wi-fi radio, a Google TV with the ability to find thousands of programs from around the world and a quick list of your favorites, thus breaking the cable monopolies?

Google's supernetwork, possibly a million computer servers by the end of this year, connected by thousands of miles of fiberoptic cable, is not only a supercomputer at your fingertips, but could become a major backbone of the Internet itself.

What about organizing and keeping track of our finances? Froogle (better work on this one, guys), Google Finance, Google Checkout. Why not Google Banking, a Google stock trading system, Google credit cards?

And Google could create more specialized information categories. Certainly Google Library, Catalogs, Yellow Pages; but maybe Google's government search can be subdivided into Google Elections and Campaign cateories (changing the costs and dynamics of political campaigns, relying on the Internet rather than TV ads), or Google Travel, Google flea markets (sorry, eBay). Maybe Google could buy Craig's List, a great fit for the company, and job postings would become free.

In fact, all of this would be free or (in the case of hardware) exorbitantly cheap, supported by a Google monopoly in advertising.

There is certainly more that I haven't thought of offhand. Any other suggestions?

This is speculative and an extreme scenario, but all within the realm of possibility. Who's gonna stop it? Microsoft?

Why Google/YouTube may not be a mistake

My friend Shel Israel justifiably takes the New York Times to task in his blog. The Times rails on the YouTube acquisition as reminiscent of the bubble.

I still agree with Mark Cuban that this is going to invite more lawsuits because piracy is hard to stop and Google is rich enough to sue. Google is willing to take on the lawsuits because, as Sergey says, the company has "legitimate" difference of opinion with copyright holders.

But harkening back to the early part of this century is wrong. Google wants to provide all the Internet's information for free and its own video site just can't catch YouTube.

Let's look at the positives.

This is, as I said before, a big switch in strategy for Google. It seems to be getting away from NIH to buy and partner with successful companies instead. In that sense, it's a good approach.

Google is stepping away from one of the strategies it copied from Microsoft: looking for good products, then creating its own version until it can take over the market. On the Internet, that strategy doesn't work. Innovation is too rapid. And once you have an audience on the Internet, it's hard to draw them away. Microsoft had the advantage of an almost exclusive ownership of the desktop to make its other products successfuo. And it got sued by several governments for it.

Googloe's willingness to buy companies could help innovation enormously. As Business week points out, VCs have found it hard to cash out on their investments, and Google has now emerged as a major exit strategy. Of course, if Google starts buying the right companies, it will become even more of a powerhouse than it is today.

If you believe, as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer implies in the Times article, that user-generated video is a passing fad, then this acquisition is a mistake. I don't believe that for a nanosecond.

Still, for a killer commentary on YouTube's contribution to Google's mission statement to "organize the world's information and make it universally accesible and useful," you have to see Philipp Lennsen's posting on Google Blogoscoped. Nevertheless, "information" includes entertainment, and there's no accounting for people's taste in entertainment.

Google likes user-generated stuff. It's part of its philosophy of Power to the People.

At least it will draw us away from watching so much television.

Google and YouTube may be a mistake

Everybody's buzzing about Google and YouTube. Stocks went up on the news. Commentators are writing about why it makes so much sense. I'm not so sure.

Mark Cuban points out one big problem: Lawsuits. As if Google weren't being sued enough already (at the last Google Shareholder's meeting, someone asked what the company was being sued for, and head lawyer David Drummond responded, "How much time do you have?") Cuban, who founded the the Web's first popular audio broadcast site, Broadcast.com, and sold it to Yahoo, knows what he's talking about.

What happens when thousands of people who create their own videos start suing Google/YouTube because others keep downloading their videos, which are automatically copyrighted as soon as they're posted? YouTube does downloads, not streams. Most pundits seem to think Google will have blocking technology to deal with that problem. I don't have that much faith in technology, especially when it's attacked by hackers.

Perhaps Google will switch to a streaming model. But unlike Cuban, I also worry strongly about the media companies suing. People are going to be creating mashups of videos, and will post pirated works. It's the direction of the Internet. When there's a copyright violation, who you gonna sue? The company with the deep pockets.

This whole concept of being a content site that lets people post their own stuff is great in theory (that's what blog sites are all about.) But man, you enter into a quagmire when anyone can post anything. Just because Internet companies are now trying to work with established media companies, it doesn't mean they will sit back quietly while their familiar business models disappear. The spirit of Napster still lives in the Internet.

It's going to be bad enough that Google Search will find pirated video all over the Internet. When the stuff is on its own site, the lawsuits will fly. I'm certain there are a lot of lawyers salivating over these trends like drunken sailors on the shores of Tahiti after five years at sea.

I also have a problem with google being in the video posting space for other reasons. It's something that strikes me, finally, as a move that violates Google's original mandate. Google used to avoid being a "media company," instead vowing to send people to other sites to find their content. I think Google may actually manage to keep sending people offsite if the best videos don't reside at home. but why set up the conflict of interest?

People don't seem to get it. Media sites are a great service. But monetizing them is a huge problem. Let/Yahoo be the media/portal. It can't compete with Google, so it may as well step into its own quagmire.

Follow up on Time article

The Time article I talk about below is turning out to be right on. The LA Times now reports that Sergey has let the word out that the new Google campaign is to focus on "Features, not products." (Google puts the lid on new products).

And a sign of more partnerships, Techcrunch first reported rumors of Google's interest in buying YouTube, and the Wall Street Journal has followed up with a source that says talks are indeed in the works. Way to go Caplan!

Google gets back to basics

Jeremy Caplan ha written an excellent article in Time magazine about Google's future directions. I'm surprised. Time rarely seems to do anything insightful on a tech company (like its cover on Google last February, which says nothing new.) Usually, it's John Markoff at the New York Times or Steven Levy at Newsweek who manage to provide real insight to tech companies in the general press.

Caplan leads off informing us that Google is going after more partnerships with small companies. "Partnerships had not been a core part of the way we were running the company," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "When you're a small company, you have to do everything yourself. As you get more established, you realize you'll never get everything done by yourself."

I don't buy the idea that you HAVE to do everything yourself when you're small. It's about time that Google went in this direction. It has suffered from too much arrogance of the NIH type. Most of its products are simply in-house versions of things others have done well (a strategy that Microsoft has long followed). So why not buy or partner with those other companies? "We start with the premise that we should partner with everybody," says Tim Armstrong, Google's vice president of ad sales. That is an excellent place to start.

Google has now assigned more developers than ever before to its core search technology, which it should have been focusing more on all along. Coming changes include morphing "the vanilla results page" into something that includes "images, videos and even conversations among Web users" instead of just static text links. Since Google understands the need for simplicity and not pissing off customers, I expect these to be handled judiciously. Otherwise, Google loses a big advantage. Adds Marissa Mayer: "We need more features and fewer products." Excellent!

The article points out that Google's goal is not just to organize your information, but to help you organize your life. That's another way of putting it, but my take is that Google realizes that your personal information is just as important as outside information. With Google desktop, spreadsheets, gmail, etc., I no longere lose my personal info.

It is also focusing more on new advertising opportunities, a wise move considering that's practically its only revenue source. Irma Zandl, principal of the Zandl Group, a marketing and trend-forecasting agency, thinks that's dangerous. "They seem to be going in a less consumer-centric direction, focusing instead on monetizing to the max, which may be a good thing from a Wall Street perspective but perhaps not so good from the consumers' standpoint." That opinion is nonsense. Google serves its customers best when it supplies them with the best products on the market.

Schmidt is absolutely right when he says "the seeds of our own destruction are within us," not from outsiders. NIH was a big danger.

These are significant and positive changes at Google.

I'll keep an eye out for more good stuff from Caplan.

Why Google Library is important

Sure, Sergey Brin and Larry Page have egos the size of a small galaxy, but they really are trying to do great things for the world. Did you know that when they first created Google at Stanford, they didn't even want to create a commercial business out of it? They actually went around telling people that their search engine should be a non-profit. I've been told that their original pledge was not "Don't be evil," but was, in fact, "Don't go commercial." When they watched colleagues start getting rich of the dot-com boom, however, they made their first step toward selling out.

'Don't be evil' is a pledge to build a different kind of company, however. In the prospectus Google filed to the SEC before it went public, Sergey and Larry led off with a letter to prospective shareholders saying their main goal was "to make the world a better place." The filings also included a professed desire to doing "things that matter" and providing "a great service to the world." The SEC wrote letters to them insisting that sush nonsense did not belong in in an SEC document, but the language was not removed.

Larry and Sergey are undoubtedly the greatest and most important librarians since the creation of the Great Library of Alexandria around 300 B.C. That Library was created by Ptolemy I, a former general in Alexander the Great's army, who became Pharoah of Egypt after Alexander died and the spoils of his conquests were divided up by his generals. Ptolemy was an intellectual, and turned the new city of Alexandria into a thriving intellectual center by creating the library, an attempt to collect all the books in the world. The Library survived for the entire reign of the Ptolemy family, about 300 years, and amassed more than 500,000 scrolls, a volume that far surpasses any library created since.

Except, of course, for the great library known as the Internet. Sergey and Larry recognized that something that big requred a new approach to organizing and finding all those texts. The Library of Alexandria shows how a massive database inspires new inventions. In order to find the right texts, the Librarians of Alexandria had to invent new organization and search techniques. They invented the concepts of alphabetization, bibliographies, dictionaries, glossaries, and Grammars, none of which existed before. How different would scholarship be without that Library? And if Larry hadn't come up with the concept of Page Ranks and pledged to never bias search results in favor of advertisers, how good would search be today?

Alexandria also changed world cultures. Scholars from all over the world came there to study and write, from Euclid to Archimedes to the physicist Stratos. Greek -- Ptolemy's language -- became the official language throughout the Middle East. Scholars at the Library created a Greek translation of the Hebrew Torah, called the Septuagent, which scholars believe was the text Jesus used to teach his Greek-speaking audience. The Septuagent became the Christian Old Testament. How's that for influence?

The Internet is having just as big an impact on the modern world. And that's why Google is essential. The company is dedicated to indexing and providing a guide to all the world's information. That, of course, includes all the books they can digitize. That's also why Google gets into so much trouble with publishers and other copyright holders. Sergey and Larry believe their goal of helping us find any piece of information in the world is more important than ridiculously strict copyright laws that keep most books out of print and stifle creativity.

The Ptolemies also believed their library ws more important than anyone's laws. In Athens, politicians decided it was important to preserve the original plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes, so put "official" versions in their archives and demanded that people stick to the originals when performing the plays, instead of copying them incorrectly and making their own changes. Ptolemy III wanted to collect the oldest versions of any text he could find for the Library, because these would be less corrupted by imperfect copies. So he asked the officials at Athens if he could borrow those plays to make copies for his Library. To ensure their return, the Athenians made him pay an enormous deposit, the equivalent of millions of dollars today. But Ptolemy sent back the copies he made instead, keeping the originals for the Library and forfeiting his deposit. It’s the biggest library fine ever paid.

Until, of course, copyright holders finish with Google.

Oh no!: Should we "allow" Google to index the world's information for us?

Do you want Google to be the librarian of the world? I certainly do. There has been no one more dedicated than Larry Page and Sergey Brin to indexing and preserving all the world's information since Ptolemy I created the Library of Alexandria, around 300 BC.

If you don't like the idea of this role for Google, you'll be much happier reading "A risky Gamble with Google," by New York University assistant professor of culture and communication Siva Vaidhyanathan. He worries about the dangers of Google Library

Vaidhyanathan's basic premise seems to be that Google is just too damn powerful. Yeah, so is George Bush. But we can vote against both of them, and against Google more easily by simply switching to something else.

The big flaw with Vaidhyanathan's argument is that he seems to feel that if we let Google become the world's librarian, it will somehow exclude anyone else from taking on the same role. I quote:

    "Is it really proper for one company — no matter how egalitarian it claims to be — to organize all the world's information? Who asked it to? Isn't that the job of universities, libraries, academics, and librarians? Have those institutions and people failed in their mission? Must they outsource everything? Is anyone even watching to see if Google does the job properly?"

Nobody asked it to. But nobody else was doing it. And there's nothing stopping anyone from doing it today. However, apparently assuming Google will have no competition, Vaidhyanathan worries: "Companies change and fail. Libraries and universities last. Should we entrust our heritage and collective knowledge to a business that has been around for less time than Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were together? A hundred years from now, Google may well not exist."

The illogic is astounding. If Google dies out and its universal library disappears, shouldn't that please Vaidhyanathan, since he doesn't think Google should be "allowed" to build it in the first place? What's worse--losing a great guide to the world's information, or never having it at all? If Google succeeds, the index will outlast the company. There is no reason the index couldn't be turned over to the libraries themselves, and there is no reason someone else couldn't reproduce it.

Vaidhyanathan seems to be afraid that if we let Google create the library, the libraries themselves won't be forced to do it. Yeah, well, they don't have Google's resources. Larry Page and Sergey Brin really are idealists, as well as capitalists. They're offering a great gift to the world. Why would we possibly want to smack a gift horse in the mouth?

The rest of the article just repeats all the other dangers of Google: the feds could get subpoenas to find out what we're reading, there are copyright issues, etc. He seems to fail to understand that these are issues inherent in the nature of the Internet, not just Google. They would still exist if Google disappeared tomorrow. If any company or non-profit entity is going to hold all that information about me, I'd rather it were Google than anyone else. At least the company tries to protect it.

Since Mr. S took it upon himself to outline the dangers of Google Library
(who asked him to, by the way?) tomorrow I'll offer an essay on the enormous advantages the project will offer.