Google boss: I want Euro biz to be bigger than search Google's boss Larry Page is not satisfied with his company's powerful grip on the technology world and is keen to see the ad giant grow beyond its key stronghold of search, where it holds a dominant position in Europe. In an interview with the Financial Times, Page said that Google was considering changing its mission …
you are more than big enough already
You have more data on us then even the NSA/GCHQ/FSB/etc combined
Yet you still want more?
The old saying 'Those that Ask don't get' comes to mind.
In the beginning you were humble and ethical. Now the lure of billions of Ad $$$$ is corrupting you.
Time to do something else Larry before you become Ellisson mk 2.
I'm happy Google have the ambitions. Google make things better for me all the time. Thanks to them, I have better search, better phones, better tablets, more intelligent homes. OK, so they know what brand of trainers I like, that's no big deal. In exchange, I get all my digital needs satisfied.
That's a pretty sweet deal, and far better than what the Apples and Microsoft have on offer.
It is, if you like, the nature of unrestrained Capitalism. Or Human nature when applied to the kinds of people who even could administer a global megacorporation, and something you wouldn't find out, probably not even consider, and likely dismiss as ridiculous until you find yourself in the position of running a company wealthier than a fair few nations. You have to keep growing - a bit like being a workaholic, it admirable to many, but really you need help - and the only way to go is to accumulate ever more political power. Perhaps I only feel this because I grew up reading the likes of and particularly Phillip K. Dick, who so often saw a future where corporations were the Government. Nothing I have seen in my lifetime has made me think that maybe this isn't the future we're heading to after all. So, of course he wants more. Whether he knows why, is another matter; he and they might not be megalomaniacs. Yet.
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Hey remember back in the mid 90's when we first got a chance to use the internet? Netscape Navigator for a monthly subscription; Ask Jeeves and get a silly answer, ICQ chats. Since computers and printers have tumbled in price, quality of service has massively improved, thousands of new companies have sprung up pure net plays. Google's business model is really selling words to the highest bidder, they can sell the same word a billion times a day in hundreds of different languages. That is very clever and no one really thought of it before, not even Yahoo.
To do so they required huge server farms, so big they build them close to hydro power plants; having that much data and wiz kids thinking in algorithms, the logical step is data management, which got Google into really big data projects such as Google Earth; now most of us have Android phones, first Apple now Google have destroyed the mobile phone industry of a decade back. At last someone is a serious threat to Microsoft.
As the next generation of kids grow hopefully they will become budding entrepreneurs and socially aware philanthropists. What I'd like to see come out of Google now is something which empowers all those who have lost employment due to the rapid march of technology, the printing industry, advertising, next millions of truck drivers when Google's self drive trucks hit the road.
I have seen a revolution in my lifetime, gone are the socialist idea of a right to a job, replaced with ever increasing competition and decreasing job opportunities. We need new business models which does not require enforced manual labour.
So everyone who is not an entrepreneur or one of the very few employed within the magic circle will be dependent on the philanthropic generosity, or not, of the entrepreneur class who hold power. The Thatcherite illusion that everyone can just pull themselves up by their boot strings is as much a fantasy as the inevitability of proletarian revolution. Unfortunately for the future entrepreneurs Google already has total control of all the lucrative areas of the internet and whoever comes up with a new idea can only hope to be bought out and not bypassed. The illusion of democratic control of our lives is slipping away as the corporate feudalism takes control and we become nothing more that UGC workers and whatever we create becomes fodder for Google to advertise over. The best we can hope for is a return to philanthropic Victorian values and the virtual poor house.
The problem is that the rules of the game are crooked. Cancerous growth is required, and the end result is loss of freedom as alternative choices are eliminated. It's the natural result of the greediest and least ethical businessmen bribing the cheapest politicians to favor their own cancerous mentalities. We wind up with one or zero choices, which is the same as NO choice and NO freedom. Either you are forced to do business with the one surviving uber-gigantic company (soon to be the google in Web search), or you have NO choices. Let's switch to the example of Microsoft. If MS doesn't feel like offering a service or feature, then you have zero choice to use that service, especially if any other company that dared to offer the feature expects MS to retaliate and crush them (Remember Netscape, eh?)
Instead of calling it a penalty for success, we should call it a REWARD for success: Required Reproduction. Imagine the google or Microsoft were cut into two or three companies. Each new child company would start with a copy of the intellectual assets, which is a trivial matter for such companies, and an even share of the physical assets and the people. Suddenly we have more choice and increased freedom to make meaningful choices, and the total market will grow and evolve more rapidly, too. Microsoft can go as slow as they want, and they obviously want to go quite slowly, but they couldn't do that if they had REAL competition.
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