Posts tagged as: brin_page

Google's future anti-trust problems

Steve Ruble has a very thought provoking post about the possibility of the DOJ wanting to break up Google at some point in the future. I agree completely, especially the point about this hinging on the outcome of the 2008 election. Certainly if a Democrat wins the presidency Google is in trouble. I'm sure everyone remembers how the DOJ went after Microsoft during the end of the Clinton years, and then seemed to lose interest after Bush came into office. A much less publicized parallel to this occurred in the early 1980's. I owned a software mail-order business at that time, and knew that the DOJ was investigating price fixing by software companies, which was pretty blatant. I remember George Tate yelling at the top of his lungs at Spring Comdex '82, "If those bastards don't raise their prices, I'll cut them off." A DOJ lawyer had been contacting me fairly regularly about this, but then in the fall of '82 he called and said the case was closed, because the White House had decided that "price fixing was good for the economy." This was during the 1982 recession. I guess Brin and Page had better start contributing to the RNC.

What is with the lab coat?

You may not believe this, but I do try to limit my posts on Google. This was one I couldn't pass up. The Economist (the best written magazine on Earth) introduced their profile of Larry Page at CES with the line "DOES Larry Page ever get vertigo when contemplating his life and future?" I've heard about the lab coat, but I've never seen it. Why do I find it really freaky? Maybe because he isn't a doctor! Yes, he was a computer scientist, but that doesn't count. I'm willing to bet that we are looking at our generation's Howard Hughes. (Via Tech.Memeorandum.com)

Taking the God Complex to a new height

I've been reading a great discussion of Google that took place earlier this month. (via Matt Mullenweg)

One of the most frightening quotes is about Sergey Brin's expectations for Google:

I don't know why, but this gives me the creeps. Not the possible application of search to discover medical cures, but the almost megalomaniacal perspective. I especially like the part about "long-term perspective." Google is seven years old. It went public less than 2 years ago. Back in the Eighties, during the first round of explosive growth for software, we saw a phenomenon called the "God Complex," where a software company becomes so enamored of its success and imagined ability that its goals reach greater and greater heights of hubris. In theory, software can do anything, and if you are a software God, you too can do anything. In practice, great coders are still human. Brin seems to have taken the God complex to heart to an extent I have never seen before.

The first time I observed the God Complex in action was in 1984 at Lotus Development Corporation. This was about 16 months after the launch of 1-2-3, and one of the Lotus executives was describing their future plans. He concluded his rather grandiose presentation with the statement "Corporations will continue to buy from Lotus, because they have always bought from Lotus." I never forgot that claim, even though the world has largely forgotten Lotus and 1-2-3.

Google paranoia knows no limits

This interview with Larry Page in 2038 is best discovered in an RSS feed filled with headlines about Google killing industries with every move. (via Inside Google)

What do you mean it's free?

I had dinner last night with an old friend from the software business and once again had one of those conversations where we try to come to grips with a new Internet economic model. In 1995 I was telling my software friends to drop everything and start publishing web sites, but what is the business model they asked? Why should they give content away on public web pages when they could publish with AOL or Compuserve? In 1999 I was telling them to read The Cathedral and the Bazaar and try to wrap their heads around free software. But how can we give away software and still make money they cried? Last night I explained what I knew about microcontent, and said that in their rush for customers the major content holders and search engines would provide unlimited APIs and RSS feeds for all of their content.

The next wave of freely available intellectual property will once again distort the Internet economy, but that won't prevent it from happening. I don't think that there is some inevitable progression to all IP being free. Each set of changes took place for different reasons and in different times, but it is clear that massive change can occur before there is an economic justification. The Internet doesn't care if anyone makes money or loses money, the Internet serves the crowd.

The "Berlin Wall" of this next burst of data freedom will be when Google unlocks the limits on its search engine API. I say to you Brin and Page, tear down that wall!

Always on the lookout for a good 767 reference

I agree with Jack Shafer's premise, but not his predictions in his article about Google's future in Slate, but the article does have a great 767 reference:

Google academic papers

The footnotes to Chapter 2 of "The Search" cited a 1998 paper, "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine," by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. It described the early Google architecture and their plans for it. It's pretty readable, and provides an interest glimpse of their views before they dreamed of controlling the world from their own 767 continually circling the globe at 40,000 feet.

A little research revealed a set of additional papers by Brin and Page, or in some cases one of them along with other co-authors. Someday these papers may provide a historian of science with some valuable source material. I wonder if they saved their early emails?

• The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web
• What can you do with a Web in your Pocket?
• Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web.
• Data Mining: Exploring Large Rule Spaces by Sampling
• Efficient Crawling Through URL Ordering
• Dynamic Itemset Counting and Implication Rules for Market Basket Data

I also came across Sergey's home page from Stanford circa 1998, where I found this adorable picture of him.

The rumors of Microsoft's death are greatly exaggerated

The Web 2.0 bubble has reached the predictable stage of assuming that Microsoft will inevitably fail to adapt to this latest tech craze. You can get the feel for it by reading the comments on Scoble's post about this subject. Where have we seen this before? Oh yes, in December 1982 when VisiOn was announced at Fall Comdex and the press (this was before blogs existed) fell all over itself predicting that Microsoft would lose control of the operating system market to the new wave of integrating environments and integrated products. We saw it again in 1995 when Netscape's browser was going to wipe out Microsoft, because Gates just didn't understand the Internet. Now ten years later we are again hearing that Microsoft is a dinosaur and can't possibly catch up with the latest web services wave.

Let's get serious for a minute. Microsoft has control over 90% of the desktops on the planet. I haven't seen any stats that web based apps are being used by even a few percentage points of the real users out there. As keeps happening, especially in Silicon Valley, the bleeding edge sees everyone they know going crazy over a new set of technologies, and they extrapolate that onto the general public.

History has shown repeatedly that first-movers do not always win, and often disappear. VisiCorp died within a few years of announcing VisiOn, and Microsoft won that round with two products that they hadn't even started work on in 1982: Windows and Office. Netscape failed under the weight of their own arrogance, and IE is now the dominant browser. It isn't just Microsoft who has beat the early market leaders. When Google first appeared, Yahoo was firmly entrenched as the dominant search engine.

I'm far from a Microsoft fan. I've made plenty of jokes about Gates being the Antichrist. I just don't see how the race for a set of technologies that may be exciting (I'm excited by the potential of Web 2.0 too), but haven't produced any products that real people (not bloggers) are using in any sizeable numbers is already over.

Microsoft keeps winning these races for two reasons:

• They keep plugging away at an application area until they do eventually get it right. They have the cash and the fortitude to keep retooling until the market starts adopting their solution.
• Their competitors ALWAYS f*** up. This is the part where I may believe in the supernatural aspects of Gates' success. I've seen it too many times, Fylstra, Kapor, Andreesen. There is something about becoming a billionaire, or at least a hundred-millionaire, that warps people's minds and ability to innnovate. Gates has avoided this, but look at Page and Brin with their new 767 toy. The drumbeat for Google as the new evil empire can be clearly heard.

Do I think Microsoft will inevitably win this race? Of course, not. Nothing is inevitable. But anyone who says the race is already over, and Microsoft can't turn the ship around fast enough is either a fool, has an axe to grind, has no idea of the history of this industry, or all of the above.