So what? The NYT has “critical mass” in NYC.

Which reminds me, “every analyst” said that AltaVista had search and advertising locked up.

More to the point. The question isn’t whether Google has a large market share. It’s whether it’s insane to use another ad intermediary.

YaBing don’t need a dominant ad market share to produce a Google-class search engine.

Yes, Google has “ambitions”. So did Microsoft. So did IBM. So did GM and Ford.

Many right-wingers argued at the time that we should pursue engagement as with China. It’s interesting to see the result of that approach. One wonders if a 21st Century movement will emerge to disinvest in China. After all, their growth is predicated on foreign investments and international trade. The Chinese government has not forgotten what their economy was like before the market-based reforms that began in the 1980s.

I’d also like to point out that in a very real sense, perhaps even moreso than Google, Verisign is the Internet. For all intents and purposes, they control DNS (or at least, the biggest and most important chunks), which what really makes Web sites findable etc. Google’s core business revolves around the content on those sites, which is a level up in the stack, so to speak.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.03/drucker.html

Muti-national or Transnational companies have already been where Google is – but instead of infrastructure, manufacturing or consumer-goods we are debating information and possibly, ‘knowledge’.

My point is that it is readily accepted by nearly every analyst that Google has enough critical mass, that no competitor is catching them.

Could it happen? Possibly. It would probably take a paradigm shift though. And them missing the boat on it. For example someone else beating them to the bunch on predictive results. But the problem is that their position of power allows them to define the nature and timing of future paradigm shifts. This is my cause for concern.

At a certain point, their share of both search and advertising alone gives them the ability to control the pace of innovation to suit their business needs.

Now add to that browser, and platform, and cloud and messaging, and voice. Google has a vision which basically runs from end-to-end. They want everyone online 24×7. They don’t hide that. If they can provide you with your machine, the OS it runs, the browser it uses, the apps you consume, the place you keep your data, your services for messaging and collaboration, the core intelligence driving your content consumption and the advertising you are fed (and possibly even the network you traverse), they will have reached their goal.

Five years ago in advising customers to watch closely for Google to make these moves I often heard I was crazy. Now we have Chrome, and Android and ChromeOS and AppEngine and overtures to create metropolitan WiMax service. In addition, their ad revenue stream has only increased.

The trends are there for anyone to see. You can of course reach your own conclusions, but whether you search around with Yahoo, Google, or even Bing , the course is the same. Google has enormous ambitions which it is executing well on. The problem is that they have branded themselves “not evil”, people have accepted that even though its a ridiculous notion for a company, and as a result they really arent watched closely. Within 5 years or so, if the trend continues, they will be so inexorably embedded they will pretty much be impossible to compete with.

Many are probably actually OK with this. I dont think it is a healthy thing long term.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60E0BC20100117

Reading between the lines, it sounds to me like the US govt doesn’t want any additional strain on its marriage with China. After all, its really one country, at this point, under the covers.

Maybe the “interest-states” will need to start incorporating out of Belize

Note that govts do exactly the same thing.

In addition, govts will throw you in jail and/or change your taxes.

You can always refuse to deal with a company. You can’t refuse to deal with a govt.

Thanks for your fast reply. The fact that it’s no iPhone will in my (humble) opinion do more good than harm, but what’s really alarming is that the phone is ‘unGoogle’. It’s offers no platform of some kind, it’s not free or extremely cheap and the only feature that is special is Google voice(which will be available on other platforms soon).

So my question is; Is Google getting to greedy per haps?

Dank U.

Your English is excellent.

And I’m not yet sure what to think. I have the phone and it’s good but it’s no iPhone. I wish Google had used it to be more disruptive of the phone market but it wasn’t. So I’m just watching. And I”m still undecided as to whether to return the phone.

I say a *hampered internet* is better than a completely closed-shop.

Locking up one guy here or there b/c the gov’t spied on them via Google…that’s easy to measure.

Just because it’s harder to measure the *good* that results from the rest of the free-flowing information, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, or it’s not signficant.

I’m from the Netherlands so I hope you don’t mind my crooked English.

This doesn’t actually belongs in this topic, but I couldn’t find a topic(maybe a tip for a new topic, or els to make a existing topic more findable) about Google’s latest leap to atoms.

I’m reading your book as we speak(my compliments by the way). It was not difficult to see your love for Apple as Google.

So what do you think of the fact that Google is directly competiting against Apple( Nexus One/iPhone, Google tablet/Apple tablet, Google netbook(laptop)/Macbook)? Like you said”Atoms are a drag”.

Please let me know…

It depends.

> Wouldnt we all agree they’re a joke?

Not at all. Yahoo search results were on-par with/better than Google’s when I last had access to statistically valid comparisons.

The fact that advertisers aren’t willing to pay Yahoo and Bing as much as they’ll pay Google doesn’t imply that YahBing have less value to users.

> If I were putting up a website today and wanted to make money from it, I’d be insane to not use Google.

Not so fast. There are other ad networks and someone clearly thinks that they can make more value using them than using Google.

Of course, maybe those folks are wrong, but before we take you at your word, how about telling us about your relevant expertise/knowledge. For example, have you run a profitable website? On what scale? If you’ve studied the field, great – where can we see the results of that research?

It works, if you interpret information and social networks as a form of territory. they can tax it (charge to add to the information store, charge to access it), and do “violence” to it (censor it, delete it, or remove the original owner’s access to it by suspending their account). Nominally they are answerable to appeals to regular governments, but exercising jurisdictional control over all the different parts of a multinational entity can be challenging.

Personally, I see “Google as a state” as just a metaphor, but a useful and informative one.