Comments on: Googlevision: Part IV

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 03:06:58 +0000

You think you need little of what Google offers! Just wait until every aspect of your communicating life — banking, reading the newspaper, watching TV, writing an Email, listening to the radio in your car, talking on the phone — is part of a larger web of communications. We can get away with keeping these things separate now, but eventually, they will all become connected, and it will fall to some kind of system to sort us out.

I think an important part of what separates Microsoft from Google (in this arena, anyway) is that Microsoft tried to control what users could do; they used closed-source platforms and copy-protected programming. They wanted you to use their programs — and they wanted you to pay to use them. Google isn’t about making you pay for anything, for one thing, but for another, they’ve been really good about letting people do whatever they want with their tools and platforms. Sometimes I think Google couldn’t really care less what you do, as long as you use Google to do it.

By: melon

melon — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:30:01 +0000

Admittedly, I think all of this is interesting in theory. However, in practice, I need very little of what Google offers, frankly. However, I know a lot of other people do, and it’s hard to dislike them.

Interestingly, a lot of this talk about “interconnectedness” is pretty much what Microsoft tried to do 10 years ago, except the reaction to it was uniformly negative, evoking that dreaded word they can’t escape: monopoly. I’ll be curious to see if Google can outsmart even the “sue-happy” neo-Luddites this time around, but something tells me it will turn out to be a compromise, in the end.

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 25 May 2008 04:47:32 +0000

Ha ha. I hope you accepted! I only discovered Orkut a couple weeks ago as I was researching this article. I was revisiting it today when I noticed I could automatically add people from Gmail.

By: Tiffany

Tiffany — Sat, 24 May 2008 22:22:03 +0000

This explains your Orkut friend request today.

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 24 May 2008 08:13:41 +0000

*One of the reasons Zuckerberg doesn’t want to just sell Facebook to Google for a mountain of cash and retire at 24 is because he sees Facebook not as a service which could be nicely incorporated into Google’s toolbox, but as an actual competitor to Google. It’s on a much more limited scale (the applications they offer tend towards the social and time-wasting variety, as opposed to the truly useful), but, like Google, Facebook is an aggressive marketer. Facebook promises to push social advertising to new levels, with junky systems like Beacon. Obviously Facebook will never be a player of the same calibre as Google, but within their niche - social networking and social advertising (a significant niche, to be sure) - Facebook is already kicking Google’s ass. It doesn’t bode well for Google in the short term. But in the long term … there’s plenty of money to go around. If better functionality is mutually beneficial, it will happen.