Tag Archives: Google

Data-driven Google

I came across a great anecdote reading a Harvard Business Review article about culture and cultural change (Cultural Change That Sticks by Jon R Katzenbach, llona Steffen and Caroline Kronley). I’ve always known Google as an organisation that relies on data, not preconceptions, to guide its product development. I would never have imagined that it would extend all the way to campus design, at least not quite to this extent:

Google is a good example of a company that makes the most of its informal organization. A senior leader we interviewed there compared the company to universities that plan out paved walkways when they expand their campuses. At Google, he said, “we would wait to do the walkways until the employees had worn informal pathways through the grass—and then pave over only those getting the most use.”

Now that is culture.

Will Apple miss the next big thing?

Will Apple be smart enough to capitalise on the next big opportunity in personal computing – turning the smart phone into the CPU for computing anywhere?

I remember back to the time when there was a huge debate about “convergence” – the big question about whether consumers would accept one multi-functional mobile device (the Swiss Army Knife approach) or would want a series of specialized devices such as a phone, camera, GPS. MP3 player and so on. The iPhone settled that debate completely with hardware and software (apps) which cater for just about every need. It now seems incredible that anyone even argued the point.

Well, we are fast approaching a re-run of that debate. Why have a computer and a smartphone when you could use a phone as your CPU, operating system and file store and simply link via Bluetooth to a screen, keyboard and mouse? Any why not make that screen your TV?

Apple is actually very well placed to make this move. It is already converging its operating systems – OS X looks increasingly like IOS especially after Mountain Lion. And they produce a superb range of Bluetooth-enabled peripherals and brilliant screens.

But this is a big leap for a company which makes so much money from computer hardware – $6.3bn in the last quarter of 2011. Risking that is a big bet for any company, let alone one that is riding the wave with its iconic highly designed and desirable computers.

If not Apple, then maybe Android? Already there have been Android phones launched with full versions of Ubuntu Linux loaded on them.  And Android’s makers Google doesn’t have a hardware business to cannibalise. In fact, it would make massive sense for Google to back a move like this – it is trying to push an alternative to Microsoft’s Office Suite (Google Apps) and what better Trojan Horse than consumers determined to carry their computing device with them wherever they go?

Even Microsoft may be better placed to capitalise on this trend than Apple. Microsoft doesn’t actually make computers (although their OEM partners clearly do) so although there would be much painful disruption if Windows 8 became the operating system on choice on the mobile portable computing device of the future, the company could but only profit in the long run.

I may be wrong, but I bet we will see this trend play out; it remains to be seen who will ride the wave.

Scribe – doing the job for me?

I was reading about the new feature called Scribe on the Blogger in Draft blog. This post is being written using this interesting auto-suggestion system. It takes some time to get used to reading the word forming ahead of the cursor – which you need to do if you are going to really take advantage of the functionality. And for touch-typists it is probably more of a hindrance than a help. But I can see it being quite useful if you find yourself lost for words.
One more example of the spurt of functionality coming from the Blogger team – see my last post on the iOS app.

New Blogger iOS app

I’ve just installed the new Blogger App for the iPhone which has just been released. This has been an age in coming – blogging on the go to Google’s blogging platform has been painful in the extreme while services like Posterous raced ahead with multiple very easy ways to blog on the go. Perhaps this – and the (very good) redesign of Blogspot – is more evidence of the new found determination at Google to step up the pace in all things social?

Life in the Cloud

This may be the year that Cloud Computing really starts to take off – mainstream coverage has started to appear like this piece on the BBC website and it is appearing on corporate IS agendas.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this shift recently and I think under cover of this there is a much more profound change taking place – the shift from document centricity to web centricity.

By this I mean that the old client-server model which dominated the latter years of the last century gave way in this to a web-centric view of the world. Let’s call them the “Microsoft Way” and the “Google Way” since those two giants dominate each approach respectively.

The Micosoft Way focusses on the individual, sitting at his or her PC, loaded with software which empowers personal productivity, but in a off-line way. This was sensible – internet connections were slow and hard to come by and the best security came from having your documents on your machine.

Of course collaboration in this model was difficult – you created a document, emailed it to some colleagues, they each changed a bit and sent it back and you were left with the task of combining the results. This means multiple versions out them, many part-finished versions languishing on file and print servers, and email inboxes clogged up with documents.

The solutions, often quite complex and hard to use,  were then bolted on top – Track Changes to version documents, Sharepoint to store official version of documents, LiveMeeting to allow collaboration over the internet etc etc.

The Google Way is different. It starts with the internet – Google was born in a age when ubiquitous connectivity was becoming a reality.  The document in Google Apps starts life as an online document with the presumption it will be shared. Multiple people can edit the document simultaneously and all these edits can be tracked and rolled back seamlessly. Spreadsheets come with forms which can be emailed or embedded and which can update online spreadsheets which can be published onto intranets through Sites. Presentations can be instantly shared both in creation and play-back mode. Person-to-person communication through chat, video and VOIP is built in. Storage is no longer a problem – quotas are huge and growing.

Much of this can be achieved using the old paradigm but usually at an additional cost in licences (Sharepoint, Infopath, Livemeeting etc) and more often than not with the required help of internal IS staff who are needed to configure these complex add-ons.

This of course works for the IS community in corporations, creating jobs and a meaningful role in companies. But start-ups are not using these products – they are jumping straight to the cloud solutions – the Google Apps, 37 Signals, Saleforce.com solutions which are much simpler to use, and much more configurable by the users.

The result of this is dangerous – it has the capacity to create a real competitive chasm – building on a platform like Apps can empower ordinary knowledge workers to create quite sophisticated solutions without the intervention of programmers. The more they build the greater their propensity to build. And all of this extra functionality is coming at a very low cost and is increasing their agility.

In my view this is the real cultural shift at the heart of the Cloud Computing debate. Just putting your old apps into someone’s datacentre misses the point. Changing the way you work is the really smart move.

Twitter stopped

Today my Twitter timeline stopped updating and as I write it hasn’t started again. It seems I’m not alone in this – there have been a lot of people complaining of a similar thing over the past eight or nine hours. This incident got me to thinking just how important Twitter has become to me as a web tool.

I was an early user of RSS and have been very keen on Google Reader for years. However, in the last six months my usage of Reader to keep up with events had virtually stopped. My “web radar” these days is definitely Twitter.

I used to worry that I was missing a lot by relying on Twitter. But on the occasions when I did devote the time to ploughing through my thousands of accumulated posts on Google Reader, I seldom found anything I found I didn’t already know about.

I must say I’m a bit surprised to find how central Twitter has become – I wasn’t really aware of it. The disappearance of my timeline today brought it home.

The mouse that roared?

Jeff Jarvis has a go at teasing out the facts behind this weekend’s kerfuffle over the thought that Rupert Murdoch might pull out of the Google index. Murdoch said in an interview with Sky News Australia that he would pull his sites out of Google index once they went paid-for.

Jarvis points to research done by German consults The Reach Group (TRG) which tried to quantify what impact the threatened withdrawal of 148 German publishers in the so-call Hamburg Declaration would have on Google. Their conclusion: barely any. Jarvis believes the same would be true for Murdoch.

Google Wave

It’s been about a week since I first started playing with the preview of Google Wave. The first problem you encounter when you receive your coveted email invitation is finding anyone else who’s got an account that you want to communicate with. In my case, I found that were quite a few of my colleagues with accounts and we quickly hooked up in an experimental wave.

The interface is reasonable, if a little complicated, until you get used to it, and the way it incorporates real-time chat into “email” is really impressive at first – until you realise that everyone in the wave can see your appalling typing and corrections as they happens. That can be painful.

The biggest problem, though, is maintaining the momentum. Most of our communication takes place in email or Twitter or Facebook (sometimes through Twitter) and the challenge Google will have to overcome – and it’s a big one – is inertia. How to get large swathes of people to transfer their time and attention to Wave when they already have to check email, Twitter, Yammer etc.

Obviously, it’s early days and very few people are allowed to use the system. The acid test will be when it is open to all. When Google launched Gmail the product took off very rapidly because it was a superior email client, and crucially because it was interoperable with what had gone before.

Wave however is not interoperable with email. Can Google change the habits of the populace at large? I’m not so sure.

Of Murdoch, the BBC and Google

An interesting Observer today (for a change) which has prompted some thoughts on the Murdoch/BBC and Google Books debates.

First up, Murdoch. The Observer gave continuing coverage to the reaction following on from James Murdoch’s speech in its story about a dinner row between Robert Peston and Murdoch(!) Murdoch’s argument, in case you missed it, is that the BBC is “state-sponsored” media and because of the “hypothecated tax” of the licence fee can ride rough-shod over the interests of commercial broadcasters.

A comment piece by Will Hutton arguing that Murdoch’s arguments at the Edinburgh Television Festival were “specious and out of date” puts the counter position very nicely; Murdoch is hardly without an axe to grind and if we want to look to examples of market distortion then we have his own company, Sky’s own past practices to study.

It was the voracious bidding for sports rights – cross subsidised by the vast Murdoch media empire – which set up Sky for its own meteroric rise to (pay TV) market dominance. The complaints about the BBC from Murdoch, and other parts of the media, look more like a hurt industry looking around for someone to blame as ad markets go south. Google is the other target, as well as, more generally, “the internet”.

In fact, the traditional media industry has seen steady declines for years. The biggest problem is not the BBC or the internet but the industry’s own lack of foresight in building out multiple revenue streams.

All businesses need a mix of models if they are not to suffer disproportionately in the downturn (even as they capitalise disproportionately in the upturn). The healthiest have a blend of cyclical and counter-cyclical models and a spread of markets and sectors.

The very characteristic of the BBC that Murdoch is complaining of – the fact that it is too big and is into everything – will probably turn out to be its achilles heel. It is very unlikely that the BBC will enjoy above-inflation increases in the licence fee in the future – in fact, if the Tory’s win the next election a cut is probably on the cards. This means that its self-proclaimed need to cover the widest possible remit will see it stretching its resources more and more.

This in turn means that those in the niches will beat the BBC in their particular parts of the market. Already, the BBC is not best for sport, and it shouldn’t be the best for hyper-local services, either, once those really get going. My own company, Reed Business Information, is in 17 business-to-business markets in the UK and in none of them are we beaten by the BBC – or for that matter Google. We have simply more resources relative to our niches.

Does the same argument then apply to Google. Well, yes and no. In its feature on the project by Google to digitise all the world’s books – and more particularly the out of court settlement in the US which gives it protection from copyright suits – the Observer sets out the benefits and the pitfalls of Google’s adventure into books.

It is undoubtedly a good thing that all the worlds books be available to everyone – just think what that could do for education in the developing world, for example. But there are clearly dangers if Google, as a commercial enterprise, has exclusive rights to those books.

Google argues that it is motivated by philanthropy – we have only their word for that, and circumstances can change. There are parallels here with Sky and sports rights. Sky was able to outbid the incumbents and therefore won a major advantage in the market place. Google, by virtue of their exceptionally deep pockets and technical skills has been able to accomplish something in the book field that many thought impossible.

If competition is to reign then there either needs to be a second digital library of all the world’s books (who would want Microsoft, for instance, as one of the few companies with deep enough pockets, as an alternative?) or some other plan needs to be considered.

How about an international equivalent of the British Library, perhaps as a branch of the United Nations, mandated with digitising every book and making them available at a nominal (or no) cost to anyone who wants to build a service on top of the basic library? A sort of digital Library of Alexandria? There would be a lot of detail to be worked out, but nobody said this transition to a better digital world wouldn’t be complicated!
The comment piece arguing that Google needed to be policed so that its power in the digital space isn’t monopolised is I think well argued; clearly there have been huge benefits from Google’s efforts to digitise the world’s information (the digital map space wouldn’t exist in its current excellent form had it not been for Google’s determination and ingenuity. However, beware the unintended consequences.

Posted via email from jmuttram’s posterous