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Google As The Next Microsoft?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Nov 03, 2007 12:43 PM
from the yeah-he-went-there dept.
from the yeah-he-went-there dept.
theodp writes "In this week's missive, Robert X. Cringely argues that Google is starting to look a bit like Microsoft. The search giant is learning too well from the master, says Cringely, noting that Google's launch of Goog-411 after taking a long look at investing in or acquiring Free411.com under an NDA is straight out of an old Microsoft playbook. Cringely goes on to note that Google has a problem with algorithmic optimization gone mad (seconded by Newsweek), which is wreaking havoc on some AdWords customers who may find themselves out of business before they can get Google to do the right thing. Cringely concedes that Google's inability to follow through because of IT failings may not have been learned from Microsoft — it may just be an inevitable part of having an IT monopoly."
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A monopoly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft on the other hand plays in a completely different arena. Switching from one OS to another is nearly impossible for many users and at least difficult for most.
No, Google has a long way to go before they become anything like Microsoft, no matter what their tactics may appear like.
Re:A monopoly? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:A monopoly? (Score:5, Insightful)
A monopoly means you completely own a set market.
Microsoft isn't a monopoly because they have so many divisions of their business. They are a monopoly because their OS completely dominates the market, and because they practice illegal tactics to ensure it does.
Google doesn't even dominate the search or advertising markets.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not the case. A monopoly can exist because a particular government explicitly hands control of a certain market to one company. A monopoly can exist within the law.
Re:A monopoly? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They have a much stronger hold on the advertising market, where the product is not search but AdWords. Customers are businesses, not people looking for information.
If > 50% of your business comes from AdWords, switching away from it might be the end of your company...
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Google's hold on the advertising market lasts only as long as they bring hordes of searchers to the companies that advertise. As far as I know, Google is not the only company that provides an AdWords form of income. If the number of searchers drop to a certain level, they will simply switch to whichever search engine takes over.
Again, none of this is as difficult as getting everyday users to switch to a new OS.
Google is *NOT* a search company ... (Score:5, Informative)
In targeted online advertising, and perhaps online advertising in general, Google is the 800 pound Gorilla. They are not quite Microsoft yet, but they are not that far off in online advertising. They are still consolidating, they are on a curve like Microsoft's, just at a far earlier stage.
Parent
Google is *NOT* a single thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Adherence to this view forces you to claim that the company dominating internet search worldwide is in fact not a search company!
If your premises forces you to believe in crazy things, it's time to check your premises. In my world Google is both a search and an advertising company, and several other things as well. It's a little more complex to think this way, but with some practice most people can manage quite well with such a complex world view!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, but I cannot see how Google could lock people into their advertising in the same way that Microsoft locks people into Windows, Exchange and MS Office. The cost of moving to another product will remain cheap.
Google is offering apps and services to better profile individuals. If they develop the most accurate database of profiles they can achieve lockin to the same extent that Mic
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft on the other hand plays in a completely different arena. Switching from one OS to another is nearly impossible for many users and at least difficult for most.
A good point. However, I would argue that as Google (or Yahoo or MS) users employ more and more web services, it becomes harder to separate o
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe what he's doing instead is looking for a nasty word to call corporate practices he doesn't approve of, like undermining small companies after stealing
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A monopoly? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If Apple's marketshare doubled every year, they would take 5 years before becoming the dominant OS. That's a long time. It may not be for you, but for businesses it is.
Re:Let me fix this for you. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Let me fix this for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck, that's like saying slavery was a temporary social imbalance, but "the market works" so we should have waited until slavery was 'naturally' socially unacceptable, or nobody needed cotton & tobacco anymore.
Lets just overlook the whole damned problem because in time it will iron itself out? Fuck you.
Abusive monopolies deserve to be cut to pieces, PERIOD.
Parent
Monopoly? (Score:2)
...it may just be an inevitable part of having an IT monopoly.
Google can't be considered a monopoly in anything. They got to their position in the search market as they offered a significantly better search product than what was offer at the time (and is still one of the best even though others are catching up). However the other search companies still have reasonable market share, but people often go to Google out of choice (IE users see Windows Live search by default but many choose not to use it - the more it improves the more people will stay with it).
Google i
Re:Monopoly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether Google is a monopoly or not is up for discussion. But you're being blind to what it means and how a company gets to that position.
Parent
Re:Monopoly? (Score:5, Informative)
iGoogle - you suggest migrating an OS is easier that a portal? There are tons of portal pages, and they all support rss feeds. Now you're just trolling. Migrating an OS is no easy task. Changing your home page takes all of 30 seconds.
AdSense - There are alternatives to put ads on your page. Google doesn't even dominate the web advertising market.
Calender - Doesn't Google Calendar use the iCal standard, and can't it easily be imported into other programs?
You are either trolling, or have no clue what you're talking about.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's like saying CBS is an advertising company, not a television company, or the the NYT is an advertising company, not a newspaper company. Yes, they make most (or in Google's case, nearly all) of their money off ads, but the reason people buy ads with them is because of the number of people who pay attention to their core product, which in Google's case is still search. There are
Fuckin A, Brother (Score:2, Funny)
A recent search caused a bluescreen of links.
And they removed most of the promised features of Google 2.0, making it a useless upgrade. I'm waiting for Google 3.1.
Re: (Score:2)
i wouldn't have said it, if it weren't true! (Score:2)
Try it with IE!
They somehow bypass the IE security, but eventually Microsoft will solve this problem.
FUD (Score:4, Informative)
Also based on experiences of my friends being recruited to google, I must admit, it's a nightmarish process and HR staff is nowhere near the excellence of the engineers working there.
But I'd still say that comparison of Google and Microsoft is pointless beyond their sheer size.
M$ has been growing with finance in mind, asking for money where no one used to ask for it before (think software licenses, you pay for XBOX, the games and an account and in the corporate world the fees are even higher).
Google on the other hand tends to provide free service for things that used to be costly (email, data mining) and only asking money for the premium services.
So any comparison between the two is pointless.
Re: (Score:2)
Examples of free things; Search, web email, home pages.
Examples of services for sale; advertisements, apps (Google Apps Premier Edition costs $), Search engines (Google's custom search engine for business costs $)
>Google on the other hand tends to provide free service for things
In 2006 they sold a little over $10 billion dollars in advertisements. All those free things are paid via this and their IPO.
They aren't even close (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Screwing customers
2. Forcing bad products on their customers
3. Participating in anticompetitive behaviour
4. Having a monopoly
5. Bribing their way through standardisation processes
6. Giving away pay-software to create vendor lock-in
7. Produce horrible DRM that only affects those who actually pay
8. Have a chair-throwing jackass as CEO
Re:They aren't even close (Score:5, Informative)
1) I personally know 3 businesses that are out of business because of adwords shenanigans which Google to this day denies. These businesses saw their adwords budgets increase by orders of magnitude, and click throughs and sales plummet by orders of magnitude.
They went from using $1-2 thousand per week, to suddenly $2000 would get spent in 10 minutes between the hours of 1 and 2am. Google stone walled, denied, and finally did nothing for these small companies. I'm sure they aren't the only ones.
2) They are "forcing" adwords customers to have their ads listed on "link sites". that is a bad product, and if you are on adwords you are FORCED to have your ads listed there as there is no way to opt out
3) by pulling the ultimate MS move with free411 they are most certainly participating in anticompetitive behavior.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They went from using $1-2 thousand per week, to suddenly $2000 would get spent in 10 minutes between the hours of 1 and 2am. Google stone walled, denied, and finally did nothing for these small companies. I'm sure they aren't the only ones.
When you set up an Adwords account you set your budgets, you can set a daily budget on each of your campaigns and a total monthly budget. You can also set the times you want your ad campaigns to run. If somehow they got billed $2k in one day it's their fault for not setting sensible daily limits. These options are not hidden, they're asked by default when you set up a campaign.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Google while not being a monopoly, really is THE ONLY way to advertise online, nothing else works reliably that I've seen.
Unfortunately, when someone decides they are going to click fraud your ads, well there isn't anywhere to hide, you can't just take your google budget and put it on yahoo and expect
Simply put: Corps spread Google FUD (Score:5, Interesting)
A company that has rendered my computer useless many times because of a false WGA positive? That's evil. A company that injects false TCP flags into sessions to "shape" bandwidth? That's evil. A company that renders a 600 dollar phone useless because I installed a 3rd party program? That's evil.
In fact, the only thing I can recall that google has done ever even remotely evil is a censored version of google search in China. That was a VERY calculated move and they were very open about the decision. Google has actually expressed regret for not standing up for what is right. But this PALES in comparison to the crap other US companies have pulled in China. This includes border-line slave labor and the turning over of information that has led to the death of many innocent people. On the evilness scale, what google did in China was like a
Parent
Not even a close comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
Monopoly does not equil to google (Score:2)
Free standards (Score:3, Insightful)
Until then, can we please stop with all this hyperbole and nonsense about how Google is evil?
Last I checked, MSN and Yahoo both volunteered private data to both US and Chinese governments, and Google was the only company to stand up to both, yet the media kept insisting that Google was the evil party for eventually caving into Chinese law. Google gives money to the Summer of Code project, volunteers tons of code, and also doesn't have a monopoly in their market.
Google hasn't thrown chairs, hasn't threatened to destroy anyone, and doesn't have leaked evidence like the Halloween documents, proving their evil.
Where exactly are the comparisons valid?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But he did point out a few significant similarities. Fundamentally, both companies are/were trying to create a platform that other developers would use to create good stuff for users. That's been covered before and most of us are familiar with
Re:Free standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you actually seen people who have had accounts terminated for speaking poorly of Google?
Conversely, Microsoft disallows you to use terms like Linux anywhere in your XBox Live profile. Microsoft is acting on such a strategy, where as you are suggesting Google could in theory do so, while they haven't.
Google could abuse their position, as could many companies. How many companies depend on MySQL today? What if they abused that position? We don't talk about such possibilities, because it is highly unlikely. The company has established a track record that warrants trust.
Microsoft's early history involved blackmailing, buying out competitors, destroying standards, etc. Microsoft started in very seedy roots. Ask Steve Jobs off the record about Bill Gates some time. Google does not have such a past, nor leadership who use such tactics.
From day 1, they practiced a different model. Be open, don't harass your customers with big, annoying ads everwhere, provide superior alternatives, offer your stuff for free, etc. They have a company motto of "Don't Be Evil". Many of the things that have given Google an advantage, they offer up freely to everyone else.
They have opened the designs and standards on their server and power supplies. They contribute their optimizations back to the MySQL devs. They pay people to develop FOSS. Where is there any evidence that Google is going to start trapping people into their platform and abusing them, especially when Google is often in support of open, cross-platform standards?
Google could have released their own fork of Firefox, and locked people in. Instead they contribute code and money to Firefox. They could have released their own Linux distro, and locked people in. Instead they contribute code to BSD, OpenSolaris, Linux and all kinds of open apps via Summer of Code.
You can force parallels in places if you want. Someone made various parallels between Orson Scott Card's character Ender in Ender's Game with Hitler, and made what seemed to be a convincing arguement based on a number of coincidences that the characters were the same, save for the real biggy. Hitler believed in genocide, and Ender unwittingly committed a genocide and felt guilty for the rest of his life. Sometimes we see these coincidences and overlook the important parts.
In all the areas that really matter, Google is vastly different from Microsoft, and that is why I don't put stock in these comparisons.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
*sniff*, I do love the smell of a good meme [slashdot.org] in the morning. I guess all that FUD is working!
You mean the guy that sued his clone makers out of existence, won't let me run the OS I bought on any hardware I want and won't let me buy an iPod with legal tender cash so he can fight the evil people who are trying to let me use *my* $400 device as I see fit? Ye
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Uhhhh.... They wouldn't be a monopoly any more?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Although, I might declare you a tool for making such an assumption.
Google? Microsoft? (Score:3, Funny)
I don't understand (Score:2)
They've got a ton of services, yes...but I can't think of a single one which doesn't have competitors that I'm entirely free to use the moment I feel like it. If I don't like gmail, I can easily use something else. If I don't like Google itself, I can easily use Yahoo, MSN Live, or any number of others. So the fact is, they're not a monopoly at all...and I actually find t
Dupe, dupe and dupe (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course Google is like Microsoft! (Score:2)
(No, I didn't rtfa - it's cringley after all)
3 groups... (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know anything about the free411 thing. That might be "Evil" if it is how Cringely suggests. But with no details, it's hard to speculate.
The adSense complaining is in no way an indicator of a Microsoft-like monopoly. Google must balance the interests of users, content-providers, and advertisers. Subsets of all three groups are trying to game Google for their own benefit. Of those three groups, Google seems to be most leery of offending the users -- and this has worked well for them.
The user, really, is in control here. The user could use another search. They could put ads.google.com (or whatever) in their hosts.txt file (like many have done to doubleclick and others). Even for those who can't/won't do that, users can avoid pages they know have ads that are more annoying than the content is good (Otherwise I would read Dilbert every day -- but not with popup-blocker avoiding popunders.) Further, since the other two groups are trying to game google to get the attention of users, Google acts as a kind of spam filter for the user, only giving them ads that they can manage -- or even ignore. (Thus Google's limits on the number ads per page, etc.)
The content provider wants, simply, to make money. They have content -- which drives page hits -- and want to monetize that. They have some tension with Google over caches and summaries, but Google can make that up to them by increasing their traffic (for free, when the user searches) and maybe by providing money, if they use Google ads.
Advertisers are the loudest complainers, especially those who have chosen to base their business mostly on Google's referals. They also try the hardest to game Google, to get more users. This group seems to think that since they are the ones paying Google, that they're the only customers of Google, and that Google must treat them better than the other two groups. This is also the only group from whose perspective the 'monopoly' claims begin to make sense. If an online business wants traffic, they pretty much have to deal with Google, since Google "controls" so much traffic. Clearly, some of them resent Google for this lack of choice.
The content providers could choose someone other than Google to support their pages, and the users could opt out of google ads if they wanted. But the advertisers are stuck with google. This might allow google to abuse the advertisers if they wanted. I haven't seen them going that far, though. But they are willing to tweak their algorythems in ways that that sometimes hurt advertisers. I don't think it's intentionally "Evil", but the consequences are hard to foresee. (On the other hand, I've never seen google ads screw up a page's layout, much less infect a user's computer with spyware or worse.) I think that Google would love to be completely fair to these customers, but that's "hard," especially since many of these users are trying to be Evil to Google and the other two groups.
Anyway -- this is one way free markets work. The users and content providers have chosen the terms on which they'll deal with advertisers. If you don't like Google, you'll have to come up with something that's more attractive to those groups, in order to compete.
The comparison to Microsoft is there, but pretty weak. Microsoft does have to address the interests of users, 3rd party developers, and hardware manufactures. Microsoft uses its domanance in its OS and office products to keep all three groups locked in to each other and themselves. Microsoft does seem to favor developers over the other two, but only if the developers will lock themselves into the Microsoft-way of doing things (eg, Microsoft APIs instead of portable code.) This locks users in (if the software they want runs only on Windows), which in turn gives MSFT more clout when ordering hardware vendors around. Microsoft lock-in of some users puts pressure on others to do the same (what else do you do when someone sends you a Word2007 or Visio document that needs to be edi
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What cannot be stated loudly enough is that when advertisers and content providers attempt to game the system, they have a negative impact on the users.
There was a time when Google was unmatched at getting you what you were looking for. As soon as people started to hack their PageRank, that web search Garden of Eden was destroyed. They're still pretty good, but many off-the-beaten-path keywords churn up increasingly suboptimal results, and I can only conclude that this is because they're attempting to inf
Shorter Cringley: (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Sometimes the change in algorithms has negative consequences for some websites.
3) Some websites are living so close to the edge that one month of Google putting their ads in less optimal places costs them so much money it drives them out of business in a single month.
4) It's not the fault of the marginal businesses who don't have the sense to set daily and monthly expenditure limits they could afford, or who have made themselves so dependent on Google that one month of suboptimal ad placement sinks them. It's Google's fault for trying to improve its algorithms.
5) Therefore, Google is Microsoftian in its evil.
Google is like Microsoft... (Score:3, Insightful)
But, yes, they are like Microsoft in that their stock is doing really well.