Google’s Mission: the Experience
Google has ignited yet another firestorm with a new product announcement. They have certainly garnered a lot of press with recent launches such as the much touted Android OS version 2.1 on their Nexus One mobile phone. Despite the growing privacy concerns that pundits and industry experts have, most of Google’s product announcements have been generally well received.
One reason that Google is so enthusiastically followed by tech watchers is that they have engaged in several David and Goliath type struggles. [Nexus One – iphone, Chrome-MS/Apple, Gmail, Docs-Office] Of course if Google is David, how big is Goliath and how do I keep him off my foot? If you think about it, Google’s initial launch into search came after Yahoo had already become the planet Earth’s first default search engine. In fact, Yahoo had already gotten bored with search and had moved their focus to other areas of the online experience. The future of search was set at that point because Yahoo had what everyone thought was an ironclad lock on it—everyone that is—except 2 nutty guys named Larry and Sergey.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Yahoo’s homepage stuffed in whatever new junk they were focusing on at the time. They put as many products on the screen as they could. Consequently, the load times for most Yahoo pages were quite slow. I was a progressive at the time with an ISDN line. I had 64kb/s of raw speed, which I thought made me a rock star among Net savvy users. If my load times for Yahoo were slow, I didn’t want to think about the poor souls using the typical 56k modems, which were never able to reach 56kb/s actual speed.
One day while I was surfing, I refreshed my Slashdot window and saw a post asking users to test out this new search thingy called the Google (LOL). When I think back on it, I was probably one of the first humans among the general public ever to use it. I chuckled at the name since I thought the Google-plex was the coolest thing in math and wondered humorously if they got it from counting all the bits on the Net. After clicking the link, Google’s page was fully rendered before my finger completed the click. I typed in a generic search term and as with the first click, the results were displayed before my finger left the enter button. I thought, “Wow! Well what have we got here?” Since that day, I think I can count the number of times I have typed the word yahoo on one hand.
The point I am making is that Google has always focused on the experience. Since that first historic Slashdot post, Google has never (okay, rarely) done anything that has not improved the user’s experience online in some significant way. Google lives in the cloud so it is in Google’s interest to incentivize people to stay in the cloud as much as possible. The longer a person surfs, the more ads they can be served. That is the source of Google’s revenue.
That said, it is easy to see how Google wants to become the master of its own destiny. Microsoft has crushed many businesses that have come along that had the audacity to…uh, get big. Getting big seems to be a threat to Microsoft because it means you might some day challenge them, well…in one way or another. Just off the top of my head, I could list 20 or 30 companies driven out of business by them over the years but the most obvious example is Netscape. This American success story was cut short not for anything they did but for what Microsoft envisioned they might do some day…maybe. Somehow, Microsoft let Google slip by and since noticing that they were…well…big…is trying desperately to undo that mistake with their new online offerings such as bing search, Windows live products like Office Live, and cloud-based storage. In fact if Google was a bug, Microsoft would be building the biggest can of RAID that money can buy.
Right on Microsoft’s heels is Comcast, who despite what John C. Dvorak says in jest, is NOT Comcastic in my view. Comcast has been fighting with its own users for quite some time now over bandwidth utilization. They claim that so-called “bandwidth hogs” are costing them money, so they throw cash at lawmakers, who then respond to their crocodile tears about file sharing and so forth by trying to pass legislation to harm bittorrent users. It is interesting that a company can make the case that a customer is abusing a product just by using it. The problem is that many people use even more bandwidth to watch services like Hulu, YouTube, and TWIT (my personal favorite) as well. These services require lots of bandwidth, in some instances well over 100GB/month, especially those that offer high definition content. Comcast sees these services as competition because the more people who can watch online, the less demand there is for premium cable services like HBO, Showtime, or sports channels. So in a way, the online services that Comcast provides as an ISP is competing directly with, or they might even say, cannibalizing their premium cable business.
Comcast has joined a long list of businesses that sees growing online competition as the 12 o’clock freight train that is about to run them down. Others include cable news, print media such as news papers and magazines, and the music industry. Given that most of these are run by aging business types who have been used to having absolute control over their medium, they are unhappy about having to allow users to wield some control over the content they consume. The music industry tried in vain for over 10 years to put the online genie back in the bottle and wasted tens of millions of dollars in the process. They could have embraced the inevitable and saved that money but power and control are the corporate executives ambrosia and the Internet is their kryptonite, so they simply could not help themselves. Rather than learn from the music and movie industries’ failures to control the online community Comcast, News corp, et. al. are determined to revisit this doomed path.
Rupert Murdoch has said that the Wall Street Journal as well as his other interests will be placed behind a “paywall” in order to force people to pay for content. Murdoch has specifically mentioned Google as enemy number one because Google indexes and then links to articles on those services, allowing people to jump directly to the article. While this is fantastic for the user experience, it may circumvent the content creator’s intent of how the content was to be presented. For example, if you want to read a NY Times article, traditionally you went looking for the newspaper and the banner on the front page was the first thing you saw. As you turned the pages toward various stories, you might pass several ads on the way. Well, the NY Times online may want to guide you past some ads as well and then perhaps some other sections that they want you to see before you leave. Deep-linking (as Google’s direct linking is called) prevents the content provider from structuring your trip through their arena in ways that they feel are most advantageous to them. Of course it can be argued that considering how lame their initial efforts have been, maybe Google is doing them a favor because the very nature of their complaints seem to prove that they do not understand the culture of the Internet at all. If they did, they would understand how to make a profit from the millions of clicks that Google is sending their way on a daily basis.
With a firm view of the climate in which Google has to operate, coupled with an understanding of how focusing on the user experience requires the company to present things in ways that can anger a broad cross-section of industry execs in several fields of business, you can understand why Google would need to offer its own high-speed Internet service. Right now they are reliant on services that have conflicting interests from both cable and telecommunications-based ISPs, mobile phone carriers, and so forth. With its YouTube property, Google could potentially become a competitive giant in all fields of video including television. With it’s own fiber offering, it can allow people to view “a la cart” without having to worry about the likes of Comcast, especially since Comcast is moving to control the medium as well as the content with its purchase of NBC. The battle for TV will be fast and furious. The days when some stuffy old guys got together and decided for you what night and at what time you were going to watch show ‘x’ is over. Today, people want to watch what they want, when they want to watch it, sort of like Tivo but everywhere and on any device. This is where Google’s offerings shine. With search, email, an operating system, browser, unrestricted devices, and targeted ads that users actually find interesting, providing their own bandwidth will allow them maximum control over the user experience without interference from a zillion different companies that are all looking out for their own interests at the expense of the Google–user relationship.
Initial reports say that Google’s planned service should operate at around 1GB/s. This would be a watershed event for users since they will no longer have to worry about reprisals from companies like Comcast that penalize users and interfere with their use of the services that they pay for. Allegations such as ISP’s having interfered with Skype to force users to buy its own VOIP service, or Comcast sending early termination packets to bittorrent users for “bandwidth shaping” will be a thing of the past. The only remaining question would be about Google’s transparency over such a new service. Would they be willing to give assurances that users can opt out of any DNS logging, targeted marketing, or packet snooping? I have to admit, Google’s offerings are very compelling unless they equivocate on privacy. I avoided their Chrome browser until they moved away from the wishy-washy 3rd party cookie policies and such. Users want clear and definitive opt-out capability. If Google makes it clear that they are willing to sacrifice a bit of their ability to target a given user in order to ensure that individuals can share only the information that they wish, there is no reason that they should not become fantastically successful with these efforts as well.
The other concern is over Google’s future directions once Larry and Sergey retire. For whatever reason, most netizens (Internet citizens) have been willing to trust in the magnanimity of Google’s founders up to this point. It is likely that people don’t believe (and neither do I) that these 2 guys started this work thinking they would be trillionaires someday. There is no doubt that they hoped they would be successful but they likely also started out with a passion for computers, passionate ideas about data management and organization, and passionate ideas about positive changes their software might bring to the world.
It is clear, that after building Google into a juggernaut worth over $120 billion, that this company has the potential to do great harm as well as good. Going forward, the importance of demonstrating respect for privacy and individual rights will increase almost daily. Privacy is the only possible hiccup society will face from our digital futures. I quote another hero of mine, Stan ‘the man’ Lee, “With great power comes great responsibility.” (show me a geek that doesn’t know that reference)
How will Google meet this challenge? As a person who awaits each new Google product with almost childlike anticipation, I hope the answer is…exceptionally.
