Nicholas Carr summarizes growing emotions about Google - quite a few negative.
My 2c:
Compared to some of the "lock-in" pricing I see (and have written extensively about) from the larger tech vendors in the enterprise IT budget, Google is still an angel - it probably will pick up bad habits along the way. Any time you can charge on a performance (or clicks) basis you are at least on the right track. And so long as you are delivering innovation - and few would argue about Google's stream of new products - it is tough to question when you compare to what we are still paying for accounting software written 30 years ago, for tweaks to RDBMS written 20 years ago, for outsourcing contracts written a decade ago and routinely renewed.
On the thornier issue of whether Google is "exploiting the web" ... Does the NY Times pay everyone it writes about? Should John Battelle pay Google, Yahoo, Andressen and others some of the royalties for his new book "Search"? Does Gartner pay start up vendors for ideas that show up as research on emerging market trends? Do consulting firms pay Gartner for re-using, sometimes wholesale, Gartner research in their own consulting deliverables? Do software companies pay users for enhancement ideas and reported bug fixes? Does Equifax pay for data specific to each of us without which they would not have a credit product? Will book publishers also sue amazon.com which now allows you to run searches of selected pages of books it sells?
Clearly, as we get more in to the "Deep Web", we will have more bruising fights. Google and other search engines will try to catalog protected intellectual property and hopefully equitable royalty sharing arrangements will emerge.
One question I have. What is Google doing about all the queries which show what's on their minds as they type in key words? Just over this weekend, looking at the tracking stats I get for my blog I see 3 users accessed Google from around the world and used words which suggest they are not happy with a particular vendor's annual maintenance pricing. I can deduce a pattern from the limited tracking tool I have. Think of how much money Google could make packaging or analyzing its data, not just linking you to other web pages....and the ethical and legal issues around that...
"Evil" Google?
Nicholas Carr summarizes growing emotions about Google - quite a few negative.
My 2c:
Compared to some of the "lock-in" pricing I see (and have written extensively about) from the larger tech vendors in the enterprise IT budget, Google is still an angel - it probably will pick up bad habits along the way. Any time you can charge on a performance (or clicks) basis you are at least on the right track. And so long as you are delivering innovation - and few would argue about Google's stream of new products - it is tough to question when you compare to what we are still paying for accounting software written 30 years ago, for tweaks to RDBMS written 20 years ago, for outsourcing contracts written a decade ago and routinely renewed.
On the thornier issue of whether Google is "exploiting the web" ... Does the NY Times pay everyone it writes about? Should John Battelle pay Google, Yahoo, Andressen and others some of the royalties for his new book "Search"? Does Gartner pay start up vendors for ideas that show up as research on emerging market trends? Do consulting firms pay Gartner for re-using, sometimes wholesale, Gartner research in their own consulting deliverables? Do software companies pay users for enhancement ideas and reported bug fixes? Does Equifax pay for data specific to each of us without which they would not have a credit product? Will book publishers also sue amazon.com which now allows you to run searches of selected pages of books it sells?
Clearly, as we get more in to the "Deep Web", we will have more bruising fights. Google and other search engines will try to catalog protected intellectual property and hopefully equitable royalty sharing arrangements will emerge.
One question I have. What is Google doing about all the queries which show what's on their minds as they type in key words? Just over this weekend, looking at the tracking stats I get for my blog I see 3 users accessed Google from around the world and used words which suggest they are not happy with a particular vendor's annual maintenance pricing. I can deduce a pattern from the limited tracking tool I have. Think of how much money Google could make packaging or analyzing its data, not just linking you to other web pages....and the ethical and legal issues around that...
October 24, 2005 in "New Web" and enterprise computing, Industry Commentary | Permalink