the beginning of the beginning of the end
I was talking about Google with Matt last night — more specifically, when they'll fall from grace. He thinks it might be a while, and considers the period when the Gmail Generation begins running for office a likely date for the turn, what with all the secrets that have been entrusted to them.
Personally, I think it'll be much sooner. The cracks in the facade are showing: Google Pages is a bust; Orkut is mostly a bust; Google Talk is mostly a bust; and I'm deeply dubious about Google Base ever turning into anything. Amazon S3 seems to have beaten GDrive to market. We'll see if they ever do a web-based office suite replacement, I suppose — their Writely acquisition is suggestive, but I have doubts about them being able to pull off a really compelling Word replacement in the browser.
There are plenty of failures that I'm forgetting, too. Google fans generally defend this hit-or-miss history by saying the company throws stuff at the wall and sees what sticks. But now they're having trouble with their core offering, too: from what I'm reading, their search difficulties extend beyond the Sitemaps problems I've been having. The "site:" operator hasn't been working correctly, and the debut of a new crawler codenamed "Big Daddy" has been wreaking havoc with folks' PageRanks.
The trouble in search-land seems like big news. If they can't keep a handle on the cornerstone of their business, the company will stop looking quite so much an eclectic whiz kid and begin appearing a bit more like an ADD-addled savant. Now that they're public, a loss in confidence could send their suspiciously dot-commie culture and strategy spiralling off into unpleasant places.
Or maybe I'm just feeling pissy because Gmail has been screwing up all day. Either way, I'm souring on GOOG.
Comments
Gmail has had all kinds of annoying delays today. I'm pissed right off.
As for the rest of it, I'm way too low-tech to know what half of that means. But I did like your "Google is ruining everything" shirt. I just never quite made it over to say so.
Sorry we didn't get a chance to say hi (although I'm sick as a dog, so you're probably better off). And yeah, the t-shirt's what got Matt and I on the subject. Strangely, I didn't think they were ruining everything prior to buying the shirt, but now I increasingly am. Maybe it's treated with some sort of anti-Google chemical.
Google already has like 80% of all Internet traffic-and I'm pretty sure the other 20% is World of Warcraft-if they had any diabolical schemes aside from making money I think we would have seen it by now. As far as them losing their business because their shit just isn't the best anymore, that's America and im siked for the future if we can expect products that exceed gmail (which I haven't had any problems with), google maps (easily the best mapping and directions program and the most consistently useful and least annoying implementation of what I'm pretty sure Web 2.0 means) and the google web search (which is always my first resource for syntax references in any programming language).
I'm not pulling Google's pud but i'm casting my packets in with theirs for now, come what may.
Google already has like 80% of all Internet traffic
Google, bittorrent, hey, same diff.
Google Talk (the client) may be a bust, but Google Talk (the IM network) is doing very well, I think, especially among people who didn't use IM before.
when I said like 80% I didn't realize I was going to be audited, what I meant (and I think the intent is pretty clear given the context) is that a ridiculous percentage of Internet searches are Google searches (something like 50%). Yes BitTorrent is responsible for more kilobytes but nobody is complaining about bitTorrent, nobody is even talking about them. This is probably gonna be the last comment here but in case anyone check back and has an interest in discoursing rather than nitpicking I like talking about the sickness
Google's ancillary services may help in the way of tech cachet, but they don't help it make money. They make their money through ads on google-owned sites and ads on non-google network sites via their adsense program. As long as search engine marketing doesn't lose favor Google should be alright. However, their success in generating ad-revenue is predicated on their search prowess and they may be in some trouble if this is being called into question.
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