Google: A Helpful Critique UK Style
April 9, 2009
I enjoy poking fun at the GOOG, but I recognize the important shift it represents. Not surprisingly those who want to keep the Newtonian universe intact are not too thrilled with Googzilla. One of my two or three readers sent me a link to “Google is Just an Amoral Menace” by the wordsmith Henry Porter. You can read this essay here. The write up does a good job of hooking verbal electrodes to various parts of the Google and cranking the voltage. I don’t feel comfortable capturing the verbal pyrotechnics but I would like to call attention to one that I found amusing:
Despite the aura of heroic young enterprise that still miraculously attaches to the web, what we are seeing is a much older and toxic capitalist model – the classic monopoly that destroys industries and individual enterprise in its bid for ever greater profits. Despite its diversification, Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time. On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues – in the final quarter of last year its revenues were $5.7bn, and it currently sits on a cash pile of $8.6bn. Its monopolistic tendencies took an extra twist this weekend with rumours that it may buy the micro-blogging site Twitter and its plans – contested by academics – to scan a vast library of books that are out of print but still in copyright.
I recall Mr. Porter turning down an invitation to review my Google studies. These make clear that the GOOG has been chugging away for a decade. Over the past 360 plus months, Google engineers have applied math and technology to information processes. The result is a new type of information system. Google has not done a particularly good job of explaining how MapReduce works, what a container is, or providing a coherent explanation of its semantic methods. I don’t think the GOOG is a secret outfit. I think it is a haven for mathematicians and technologists who are more comfortable with equations and birds of a feather than journalist, public relations, or marketing types.
The world of Newton.
Even more interesting is that my research revealed that Google has not been an innovator in the sense of the guy who ran naked shouting Eureka! centuries ago. Nope. The GOOG amalgamates chunks of tech that deliver results. Because Google focused on scale (necessary to index the dross on the Internet), Google ended up with a machine built to do Web search that quite surprisingly had other uses. My mom did this trick all the time. A milk carton was converted to a flower pot or a clothes pin to a child’s doll. Math folks are clever. Google has lots of math folks. So what’s the big surprise that Google is clever. Remember how most students hated the kid who said, “Train A arrives five minutes before Train B” and then can’t explain how she got the answer. Not only that, the girl of whom I am thinking never worked any steps in any math problem and I was in an advanced class in high school. The teachers were forgiving and let her work on physics while the rest of the class laboriously followed the rules. She’s now a doctor in Colorado and still can’t explain how she “knows” answers. Live with it. That’s what I did. I got an A, but she was in another league.
The world of Google.
I think it is interesting to read the howls against the wind. The problem is that the GOOG is more than a decade old and has become the 21st century equivalent of Stanford-Morgan-Rockefeller-Carnegie. My suggestion. Learn how to surf on Google.
Where were these critics for the last eight or nine years? I wonder if they were using Google Web search and ignoring the company’s surround and seep strategy in publishing and six other business sectors. My research revealed that the GOOG has been running straight and true for a long time in the online world.
Stephen Arnold, April 9, 2009
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Google will become the largest corporation in the world within 20 years
See why in this information market paper
Why Goog is still a buy
http://www.babelation.com/?q=node/762