All the Mashed Potatoes

http://daringfireball.net/2013/05/all_the_mashed_potatoes

by tambourine_man • 13 years ago

15 8 13 years ago

kibibu• 13 years ago

I think it's very difficult to underestimate just how much good will Google have lost recently, and I suspect it's almost entirely due to shutting down Google Reader.

While it's not the end of the world, there has been a marked shift in the narrative around Google's products and services after that announcement, and you'll notice that every new announcement from Google has some sort of "but how long will it last?" commentary.

shimsham• 13 years ago

Rankles is a great word. Google appears to have at least as many googlepologists as apple does fanbois, tho one doesn't recognise that whilst the other sees it for what it is.

taylodl• 13 years ago

What rankles about Google is their hypocrisy.

Google is an order of magnitude more evil than Microsoft had ever hoped to be and yet Microsoft was unabashed for who they were. Google continues to deceive. Deception is a fundamental component of their corporate strategy.

cleverjake• 13 years ago

Do go on

thaumaturgy2• 13 years ago

Gruber might be struggling to make the point that Google seems unfocused right now. At least, I hope that's the point he's trying to make; it's the only one I can see that might have some validity.

He sees some kind of hypocrisy in Google that doesn't exist in other major companies, including Apple. The quote from Jony Ive is distracting (of course Apple's goal was to make money -- otherwise Apple's pricing would've resulted in a different financial outcome than "more money than God"), but Gruber seems to think there's still some kind of difference between that quote and Larry Page's recent comments.

At first glance, Page seems to be saying much the same as Ive: that the focus is (or should be) on product development. Ive says, "we focus on great products and money will follow", Page says, "we [as an industry] should be focusing on building great things".

You can watch Page's keynote speech at http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-google-io-speech-2... -- the comments relevant to the current discussion start at ~2:57:00, but the whole speech is worth listening to.

I think Page is just saying, "look, if the industry stopped focusing on Google versus someone else, we'd all get to enjoy better technology and a better life." He expresses his frustration with companies that resist cooperating. I don't see any hypocrisy here; he's expressing a positive attitude about the future of the tech industry and its role in people's lives -- and that, to get to that future, other people and companies need to change their attitude too.

Gruber seems to interpret all of that as Page saying, "Google doesn't deserve criticism for competing with other companies".

So that's a poor interpretation of what Page was saying.

But, I think it's clear that not all of Google's products fit Page's vision of the future, either.

For a while, Google seemed to operate on a business model that depended on applying their strengths from one problem to the next. In developing its search product, Google pioneered massively scalable storage and processing technology. They then applied that to email. When it was released on an invitation basis, Gmail's storage and search & filter capabilities were revolutionary. Google then applied its AJAX technology in Gmail and storage technology in Search to a new Maps product. Google Labs was essentially an effort to see how Google could apply its resources and skills to other problems. (For brevity's sake I'm going to skip over a mind-boggling number of other products.)

Then there was a subtle change in Google's focus: they went from focusing on stuff they could do well, to focusing on stuff that other people weren't doing well. I think this might be where Gruber sees hypocrisy.

Android (and the Nexus) was Google's answer to the way Apple handled the market it developed. Remember that the iPhone wasn't even available on non-AT&T networks for years, and that Apple got into an aggressive war with users and hackers that attempted to use the devices in ways that Apple didn't design for. The App Store, when it came out, was the first serious effort to centralize all third-party software distribution for a platform. Suddenly, the device wasn't really yours anymore. So, I think Google's top management looked at that and said, "we don't like where this is going, let's build our own version of this."

Google Plus was Google's answer to Facebook. There was a similar situation here: Facebook had suffered a number of criticisms over user privacy, the inability to delete accounts, and the inability to export your data.

More recently, there seems to have been another change in Google's focus: they want to be the one-stop shop for everything someone might need online. This is the only way I can see GPMAA fitting into Google's product development. It doesn't appear to do anything better than Spotify (http://techland.time.com/2013/05/16/google-play-music-all-ac...) or other players in the industry; it just exists as an alternative to other services so that Google's user base has one less reason to ever leave the Google brand umbrella.

Contrast this with Apple's approach, which (under Jobs) was to focus with laser-like attention on a single new market, nail that down with a few new products or services, then put it on life support and move on to the next market.

So, I think Page was being genuine in his speech, but Gruber and others are having difficulty reconciling his statements with a Google that seems to want to own a piece of everything.

djanogo• 13 years ago

I disagree, the article was pretty clear with that point about Google just feeding to Googlers what they want to hear(like politicians?). Google can enter any market they want and run that product with loss just to put the competitor's product out of market.

I also disagree with your suggestion that Google plus was created because Facebook had privacy issues, it's pretty much well known that Plus was created to protect the future of it's core money making product. Ads.

However as article points out, this is capitalism at work. Gruber's point is google is just trying to sugar coat this.

thaumaturgy2• 13 years ago

People aren't going to abandon competitors just because Google offers a cheaper service. I don't think we know Larry Page well enough to adopt a cynical interpretation of his time on stage.

"It's pretty much well known" translates to, "this is the reasoning a lot of people have decided they like, it's entirely guesswork." The stated reason for Google+, from the introductory blog post (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-pr...), was, "In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it." If someone wants to make the claim that one of Google's motivations was also to make more ad revenue, I certainly wouldn't disagree. But, I think that at that stage of the company, Google's executives simply chose to compete with Facebook because of the at-the-time well-publicized problems people had with Facebook. I'd need to see some actual evidence, like statements from Google executives or insiders closely associated with the project, before I'd believe that Google+ was only about ad revenue.

If that's Gruber's point, it would be a remarkably stupid one to make. I'd rather give him a little more credit than that.

pupppet• 13 years ago

What do you expect from Apple's unofficial cheerleader. He's made a career out of shaking his pom-poms in Apple's direction.

All the Mashed Potatoes

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