Has Google Peaked?

nile_list writes "Robert X. Cringely's latest column explores just what the heck Google could be doing. 'Google likes to play the Black Box game. What are they DOING in all those buildings with all those PhDs?' He concludes that it's likely Google has peaked as a company: 'What if everyone is mainly wrong? What if search and PageRank and AdSense are Google's corporate apex. Most companies would be content with that, but Google isn't supposed to be like most companies. But what if they are?' His conclusion is that 'Microsoft's clearest threat still comes from Apple, though not the way most people expect.' It's an interesting read."

Re:Google hasn't peaked.

[nwbvt]

"Google has a lot of project in the works, including Gmail, Gtalk, Google Desktop, etc. These projects are anything but mainstream and have a LOT of room for growth. Hell, there's still even room for growth in their primary market, the search engine. Though they are huge, they are far from owning that market."

Yes, but out of all their many products, they have only one major source of income, Adsense. Their entire business model is based on advertising. Remember how the dot-com boom in the late 90's turned out? And how many of their products work well with Adsense? While I occasionally find the ads coming off of search results useful, I've never seen anything in gmail that was remotely helpful.

"As for me, I'm convinced that if anyone will ever knock off Microsoft, it will be an OS that gets game developers behind them. I've said for years that as weird as it sounds, gamers drive the market. Not many people use computers at home or school for productive uses, most people use them for playing games."

I know these are somewhat old numbers, but according to the census bureau [census.gov] in '01:

• 55.9% of computer uers play games (though that probably counts games like solitare and freecell as well as City of Heroes and Warcraft).
• 58.1% use it for word processing.
• 83.5% use it for email.
• 89.5% use it for the Internet.

So there are more popular uses.

"If City of Heroes ran on Linux, I would probably go ahead to switch to a Linux-only system, if for no other reason than it's free and I don't have to buy a new version every few years."

Try Cedega, I've heard it works fine with that particular game. Not so sure about plain old wine though.

Re:How Apple can drive MS into a berserker frenzy:

[filipe.almeida]

ipod drives are not reliable enough to run pc operating systems or to run for long hours without stopping. They have MTBF values well bellow common desktop drives.

Moron

[szfsoft]

The point is - It's not only you putting your own name on websites YOU control, it's everyone else who mentions your name on their website - Employers, friends, enemies, yellow or white pages, clubs and organizations you may belong to, forums, chatrooms, IRC logs, blogs, blog comments, guestbooks... The point is that restricting others' access to information about you is only possible to a certain degree. The best way to control it isn't to give your real name out on the internet if you don't have to and be aware of where your name is. Certain organizations publish member lists; if your name appears on a web-accessible membership list and you don't want it there the best way is to notify the webmaster of that site.

Re:Blah blah

[Bogtha]

Allow me to specify a set of web sites I NEVER want to results for.
Allow me to specify that I never want to see another damn .doc or .pdf file again.

You could add those to Google yourself with relatively simple Javascript (Greasemonkey, userjs, etc). Just append "-site:example.com -filetype:pdf" to each query.

DON'T HIDE THE GOD DAMN DELETE FEATURE UNDER A MENU!

Here's a Greasemonkey script to add a delete button [arantius.com].

How about it could come with an integrated tool that stops other toolbars from being installed? That'd be fantastic then I could just put it on my family's computers and not worry about them installing more tool bars, or any software for that matter!

I thought there was an option to disable BHOs in the latest Internet Explorer running on XP? In any case, Internet Explorer 7 will have a "safe mode" [msdn.com]. I don't think this is Google's problem to solve.

Integrate a clock, people like clocks!

Everyone has a clock [allinthehead.com].