Google and the Telcos: The Saga Continues
December 24, 2008
Earlier this year, Mercer Island Group and I held a series of briefings for telco executives. We reviewed Google’s considerable body of technology related to telephony. In those briefings, we encountered push back. Telcos did not understand what Google had been doing for seven or eight years. Furthermore, the telcos viewed the world of Google as one confined to looking up innocuous information on a free Web search with mostly meaningless advertisements sprinkled on the edges of the results. The Wall Street Journal reported that the GOOG allegedly communicated with some telcos to get a deal for high speed access for certain types of services. The story ran and Googzilla showed its fangs. But the story did not die. Now you can read more by Adam Lashinsky, editor at large, for Fortune Magazine, a dead tree output of the giant Time Warner. The digital version of the story “Google Wants Something for Nothing” here. I don’t subscribe to paper magazines anymore, so I can’t say if this CNN version is the whole enchilada or just the crumbs. The article runs down the Wall Street Journal’s story and takes more of a Google is doing something approach. For me the most interesting comment was:
The bottom line here isn’t the fine points of public policy. The main thing is attitude. The Web culture thinks things should be free. Internet access is a commodity. Music videos are for the taking.
You may want to read the story to get some insight into the perils of writing about Google and then rationalizing the differences between the “Web culture” and the dead tree crowd. My thought is that neither the telcos nor outfits like New York magazine publishers have a solid understanding of the scope of Google’s services and their implications for companies with business models that no longer work very well. I want to see what the New Year brings.
Stephen Arnold, December 24, 2008
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
