Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Book review: The Information Diet

Clay A. Johnson describes how to manage information overload

We all know a diet of fast food can cause obesity, but can consuming junk information damage our mental fitness and critical faculties?

In The Information Diet, Clay A. Johnson builds the case for being more selective in what we read, watch and listen to. In it, Clay describes how we have reached the stage of intellectual obesity, what constitutes a poor diet and suggests strategies to improve the quality of the information we consume.

The Information Diet is based upon a simple premise, that just as balanced food diet is important for physical health so too is a diverse intake of news and information necessary for a healthy understanding of the world.

Clay A. Johnson came to this view after seeing a protestor holding up a placard reading “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Could an unbalanced information diet cause a kind of intellectual obesity that warps otherwise intelligent peoples’ perspectives?

The analogy is well explored by Clay as he looks at how we can go about creating a form of “infoveganism” that favours selecting information that comes as close from the source as possible

Just as fast food replaces fibre and nutrients with fat, sugars and salt to appeal to our tastes, media organisations process information to appeal to our own perceived biases and beliefs.

Clay doesn’t just accuse the right wing of politics in this – he is as scathing of those who consider the DailyKos, Huffington Post or Keith Olbermann as their primary sources as those who do likewise with Fox News or Bill O’Reilly.

The rise of opinion driven media – something that pre-dates the web – has been because the industrial production of processed information is quicker and more profitable that the higher cost, slower alternatives; which is the same reason for the rise of the fast food industry.

For society, this has meant our political discourse has become flabbier as voters base decisions and opinions upon information that has had the facts and reality processed out of it in an attempt to attract eyeballs and paying advertisers.

In many ways, Clay has identified the fundamental problem facing mass media today; as the advertising driven model requires viewers’ and readers’ attention, producers and editors are forced to become more sensationalist and selective. This in turn is damaging the credibility of these outlets.

Unspoken in Clay’s book is the challenge for traditional media –their processing of information has long since stopped adding value and now strips out the useful data, at best dumbing down the news into a “he said, she said” argument and at worse deliberately distorting events to attract an audience.

While traditional media is suffering from its own “filter failure”, the new media information empires of Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon are developing even stronger feedback loops as our own friends on social media filter the news rather than a newsroom editor or producer.

As our primary sources of information have become more filtered and processed, societal and political structures have themselves become flabby and obese. Clay describes how the skills required to be elected in such a system almost certainly exclude those best suited to lead a diverse democracy and economy.

Clay’s strategies for improving the quality of the information we consume are basic, obvious and clever. The book is a valuable look at how we can equip ourselves to deal with the flood of data we call have to deal with every day.

Probably the most important message from The Information Diet is that we need to identify our biases, challenge our beliefs and look outside the boxes we’ve chosen for ourselves. Doing that will help us deal with the opportunities of the 21^st Century.

Clay A. Johnson’s The Information Diet is published by O’Reilly. A complimentary copy was provided as part of the publisher’s blogger review program.

Losing the supply chain

When an entire industry moves offshore it isn’t just a few jobs that are lost

The New York Times’ weekend feature on Why Apple Manufacture iPhones in China focused on the underlying reasons why manufacturing has become concentrated in the PRC.

While much of the commentary on the article has – correctly – focused on how US manufacturing move to China is destroying the economic bases of the American working and middle classes, there’s also another serious consequence of the story; the destruction of the US supply chain.

The story itself emphasised this;

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

While wage costs are important, far more critical are the surrounding supply chains. Without those, even if you want to manufacture in the US or anywhere else you’ll struggle to find suppliers and skilled labour.

The amazing thing with the United States is the world’s most powerful economy has managed to dismantle most of their supply chains that took a century to develop inside twenty years whil China has built up most of theirs since they joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001.

For the United States economy, the effects are more subtle and dramatic than they first appear. The accompanying video to their story illustrates how the multiplier effect, the number of jobs created in the wider economy for each industry worker is as much 4.7 for a manufacturing job, while a service sector worker is less than 1.

That means less employment and less wealth.

For the US, and most the Western world, we were able to avoid the effects of becoming less wealthy over the last decade by spending big on credit cards. Homes that would have been out of reach to the average American – or Australian, Brit or Irishman – were kept accessible by easy, cheap credit.

As that credit dries up with the end of the Twentieth Century debt supercycle, the economic basis of this model is eroding.

For most of us in the Western, developed world it means we are going to become poorer. Chinese and Indian workers might catch up with our living standards, but that standard will be at a lower level that we anticipated a decade or two ago.

The most interesting consequence of the New York Times’ story is what happens to the managerial classes?

Right now they appear to be riding high as their companies’ profits increase and they award themselves trips to the Paris Ritz and receive 50 million dollar payouts when caught cheating on their expenses.

Over time though this cannot continue as the senior managers themselves have become major cost centres which will eventually have to be reduced.

Indeed Apple, the leader in the outsourcing trend, is unique among US companies in that it had a driven, visionary leader and doesn’t have a bloated, self indulgent cohort of bureaucrats managing the business.

With every stage of the deskilling of America and the offshoring of supply chains, there’s been the belief that “it could happen to me” to various groups of workers – we’re now seeing the same process happen in white collar professions like the law are subcontracted to Indian and Philipino service providers.

Senior managers should have no illusions the same will happen to them as the search for cost savings runs out of targets in the rest of organisations.

The biggest problem though is that loss of supply chains and industry knowledge. The question is, can you rebuild that capacity in decade in the way China did?

Supply company image courtesy of Stock Xchange and Andy McMillan.

Megaupload, cloud computing and trust

Has Megaupload damage cloud computing’s reputation.

The closing down of file sharing site Megaupload has raised the question of trust in the cloud; “It has made cloud services look that much less legitimate” one daily paper quotes futurist Mark Pesce as saying.

For those of us advocating cloud services and advising businesses on using them, this trust issue isn’t anything new. All of us have to be careful about who we trust with our data and Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, doesn’t come to mind as someone who would stand a great deal of due diligence.

Like investments – another area where trust is essential – we have to spread our risk around. Saving copies of data to your own computer and making sure the information you save on the cloud is in a form easily read by different systems is important, as is not trusting any one service for critical services.

The taking down of Megaupload also raises other questions – as privacy advocate Lauren Weinstein points out;

“But the Megaupload case is more akin to the government seizing every safe deposit box in a bank because the bank owners (and possibly some percentage of the safe deposit box users) were simply accused — not yet convicted — of engaging in a crime.

What of the little old lady with her life savings in her box, or the person who needs to access important documents, all legitimate, all honest, no crimes of any sort involved.

They are — to use the vernacular — screwed.”

It’s this over-reaction by government agencies which is the real concern and the co-operation of large corporations in shutting down services – as we saw with the shutting down of Wikileaks – probably does more to damage trust in all online services, not just cloud computing.

Cloud services are no less trustworthy than our computer systems, all of which can breakdown, catch viruses or be compromised by staff making mistakes. We have to understand that all technologies carry some degree of risk.

For businesses and home users, we need to spread the risks around – don’t just trust one service or technology to deliver your products or services and have a fall back plan if things go wrong.

Closed for business

How many businesses left money on the table over the Christmas break?

This post originally appeared in Smart Company.

Many industries hoped this Christmas was going to be their saviour – across the country businesses in the retail, tourism, real estate and many other service sectors hoped they’d see an upbeat end to a tough year.

When you’re doing it tough you don’t turn customers away, yet thousands of businesses did that over the Christmas and New Year break by not updating their website to reflect their holiday trading hours.

Almost every business I encountered over the break had little – if any – information about their Christmas trading hours. In holiday towns where visitors are unfamiliar with the local businesses many cafes, restaurants and service businesses didn’t have a website or a local listing despite customers searching for them on iPads and smartphones.

Smart Company’s sister site Property Observer discussed this problem in the real estate industry where tenants were being left with problems over Christmas because there are no emergency contact numbers shown on websites.

What’s even more amazing about real estate agents in holiday areas is many pack up for a week or two and miss possible vacation rentals or even sales to enthusiastic out of towners. Who would have thought real estate agents would let commissions pass them by?

For me, I found information lacking on sites for both small and big businesses. To check the opening hours of Myer stores for instance required downloading a PDF file, Australia’s biggest retailer surely can spare a few hours of a junior’s time to updating the opening hours in their already inadequate store finder.

Similarly the City of Sydney fell down on their swimming pools, with their fabulous Victoria Park and Boy Charlton complexes both showing the wrong opening hours. This customer took his business to Leichhardt and North Sydney instead.

Most of the local shops did poorly as well – few had any mention of opening hours at all let alone Christmas trading times. Those who did open probably missed business because people assumed they were closed or found another place online.

Not updating a website would have made sense ten years ago when even the smallest change meant a fat bill from your web designer. Today online publishing tools like WordPress and Drupal mean there is no reason for you or your staff not to log on and make minor changes like revised hours or holiday specials.

If you still fear a fat bill each time you ask for a change to the website then it’s time to sit your designer down and discuss making some changes to the way your site works – not to mention some strong words about your billing arrangements.

Having up to date content isn’t just good for helping your customers, it also adds credibility to search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing which like sites that are regularly updated.

Almost every business has something to say during the year, whether it’s a new product line, welcoming a new staff member or having a special offer. There are also seasonal factors like Christmas, back-to-school, end of financial year and whole range of annual events that affect your industry.

The beauty of the web right now is that we aren’t constrained in what we want to say about our businesses, so next Christmas let your customers know great you are and which days and times you open.

Successful Sources Will Not Be Paid

The free myth is biting us in many ways

The whole world wants a freebie, and many of us are giving our ideas, intellectual capital and service away to online magazines in the hope of getting a link or a little bit of publicity.

Bringing the idea undone is the unfortunate reality that web is awash with free pointless material that adds little value. Your contribution, however valuable, gets lost in the static of PR driven articles and SEO optimised fluff.

This is why Google are trying to tie social recommendations into their search results, although it’s hard to see how your cousin’s LOLCat posts are going to add any more value than the generic garbage served from services like eHow.

Yet every day there’s more callouts for free content – desperate journalists and publishers beg for our ideas or labor in return for some ‘exposure’.

And that ‘exposure’ floats away into the ocean of noise and irrelevance filled with the rest of the ‘free’ content.

Giving stuff away for free isn’t working well anymore and for those of us who are trying to build a business around that model, we’re struggling to get found or heard in the morass.

Along with the wasted time, the danger is we start giving away our best, most valuable work in order to get attention and then we have nothing left to sell.

Consumers are waking up to this and beginning to focus about what they read online. We should too.

Password blues

Sharing passwords is like giving away the keys to your car, be careful.

“Johnny down the street hacked my Minecraft account!” is something almost every parent today has heard in one way or another.

If you believed the kids, the schools are full of 12 year old hacking geniuses that can unravel passwords faster than a CIA super computer.

Usually it turns out the “evil hacker” in Grade 5 had the password all along as the kids share their login details with all their friends.

The New York Times recently pulled together story showing how teenagers are sharing passwords to show their affection. One wonders how many abusive relationships see the dominant partner control the other’s social media and online accounts.

It isn’t just kids and teenagers who find themselves in trouble though, businesses make the same mistakes. Commonly sharing a password to important files and tech functions across the organisation.

Thinking this is just a small business problem would be a mistake; Australia’s Vodafone made all their entire customer base available on the Internet thanks to single logins and shared passwords for each of their dealers.

Over the years this caused major problems for customers and the honest Vodafone dealers as their unscrupulous competitors hijacked accounts and churned clients to new plans. The cost to Vodafone Australia must have been huge but impossible to quantify given they apparently had no tracking mechanism to figure out who had accessed accounts.

In households and business, the main reason we share passwords is convenience – security by nature is always inconvenient. It’s convenient not to bother locking your front door or leaving your keys in the car.

When you really value something, you lock it up and you don’t give a key to everyone in your neighbourhood. It should be the same with passwords, keep them strong and keep them secret.

Our kids learn this the hard way, we shouldn’t have to.

Scam 2.0

We’re about to see a new wave of business scams

Invoice scams are as old as business itself, no doubt opportunistic cavemen tried to scam other hunters over made up debts and Phoenician traders had to deal with suppliers claiming they’d delivered an extra few hundred Shekels of chickpeas.

Today we see these scams in all forms – imaginary invoices for web registrations, directory inclusions and local listings are just a few we’ve seen. As the web evolves, we’re seeing a new breed of tricks developing.

Online scams can range from things like letters from deposed African presidents promising riches through to aggressive sales folk promising services they can’t deliver. The latter are part of the new breed.

In 2009 Oakland’s East Bay Express alleged the review site Yelp’s sales teams were threatening business with bad reviews if they didn’t pay an advertiser fee. Four years later businesses are claiming this is still happening.

Regardless of the truth of these allegations with Yelp these distatesful sales tactics from online companies are becoming more widespread.

As social media services investors start demanding revenue to back their businesses and group buying sites reach the limits of their growth the sales teams of these organisations are desperately try to find new ways to meet higher targets.

Small and local businesses are the obvious targets of the sales teams, as the web 2.0 business model has trained consumers into expecting not to pay for online services.

Recently a fitness trainer told me how she was hounded into placing a group buying deal with one of the bigger sites; they convinced her that she should offer an 85% discount with the service taking the remaining 15%.

She provided the service for free.

Naturally the 85% off deal was successful, she was rushed off her feet and found herself working for nothing over the next month. Even had the cheap offer resulted in all the customers coming back, it would have taken her a year to recover her losses.

Clearly she should have known better and investigated how group buying sites work and the strategies for using them effectively, but she was subject to high pressure sales techniques that took advantage of her ignorance.

Many online businesses have been giving services away for free as they try to exploit the Silicon Valley greater fool business model. When the venture capital funds dry up they have to find to new ways of paying for their trendy offices with foosball tables and free organic staff meals.

This means more cold calls to business owners promising “marketing opportunities”, “getting to the top of Google” and “getting positive online reviews”.

Over time these sales calls will morph into fake negative reviews and bills for imaginary services rendered as these businesses attract desperate and unscrupulous operators.

For businesses, this means it’s a time to be on guard by making sure any invoices received are properly checked before they are paid and any sales person’s claims are thoroughly checked out before you agree to go ahead with a service.

If you hear of dodgy dealing like what Yelp has been accused of, then try to get the promises in writing and complain to your state’s fair trading department or complain to business agencies. In Australia, the ACCC is the first point of call.

A blind faith in technology

Sometimes we still have to use our judgement

“How could this happen with all the technology these ships have?” is the first question many of us had when we saw pictures of the Costa Concordia lying on its side with a ripped hull.

In an era where we have Global Positioning Systems, sonar, radar and sophisticated mapping technology it seems almost impossible that a ship could find itself in such a terrible situation.

Every generation has its own blind faith in the technology of the day and almost a hundred years ago one of the greatest shipping disasters of all – the RMS Titanic – happened because of the same belief in that era’s technology.

While the Titanic’s builders claim they never said the ship was unsinkable, popular belief held the vessel was the safest of all ocean liners with sophisticated steam engines, modern safety designs and better communications tools like the radio and Morse Code.

Those technologies were part of the Titanic’s undoing; the improved performance of steam ships saw the shipping companies competing for the Blue Riband prize of the fastest crossing of the Atlantic, meaning captains took risks they wouldn’t have with less technically advanced vessels. This is why the Titanic found itself in an ice field.

Once the ship was struck another problem with our blind faith in technology arose – we never foresee all the consquences.

In the Titanic’s case there weren’t enough lifeboats – the safety rules of the day had fallen behind the capacity of the ships and, while the Titanic exceeded the minimum number required, there were barely enough lifeboats to take a third of the passengers.

The Titanic’s sinking has some similarities in that today cruise ship companies are in an ‘arms race’ to build bigger and more luxurious liners, marketing them as floating resorts raising concerns among maritime experts that the capacity of these ships is too great for them to be evacuated quickly.

Of course we have to be careful of drawing too many parallels between the Titanic and the Costa Concordia, the Titanic’s loss of life was several orders of magnitude greater than the Concordia’s and the Titanic happened towards the end of a period when technology looked like it would solve all the world’s problems.

The sinking of the Titanic was also the peak of the Edwardian standards of “women and children first” and “for King and country.” Only one in six of the third class male passengers and half of that in second class survived.

A few years later, the clash of Edwardian culture and modern technologies was starkly shown when millions died in the trenches of France, Belgium and Gallipoli as generals applied 18th Century cavalry tactics against 20th Century weapons. Another example of not understanding the effects of new technologies.

Whenever we adopt a new technology there’s a risk we’ll get it wrong and blind faith in tools we don’t understand can lead us to a disaster.

Even in a business we can’t just accept that because a computer says “yes”, the answer is yes. Sometimes we have to think.

The end of the PC era

Why the personal computer is fading away

This morning a graph appeared on the web from analytics site Asymco showing the stalling of PC sales and the rapid catch up of Android and Apple iOS systems.

Such graphs starkly illustrate how the industry is changing as people start using tablet and smartphones instead of their PCs but there are some caveats with making blanket comments about the death of the Windows based computer.

Sales are still huge

One important thing about the chart shown is it has a logrithmic scale – a doubling in height indicates ten times the sales.

That point alone shows just how massive the lead Windows had over 15 years from the mid-1990s, something that is shown in a previous Asymco chart.

Despite Gartner’s reported 1.4% fall in PC sales – the basis of the Asymco graphs – there are still 92 million personal computers sold each quarter so it is still a massive market.

Tethered devices

One of the weaknesses with smartphones and tablet computers is they are still tethered to the desktop. If you want to get the best experience from your phone or iPad you have to synch it with your home or office computer.

For the moment that’s going to continue for most users, but not forever and the extended life of PCs means customers are using older computers to connect.

Extended life cycles

A bigger problem for the PC manufacturers is the extended life cycle of personal computers.

Since the failure of Microsoft Vista, PC users have been weaned off the idea of replacing computers every three to five years and nearly half the market is using systems that are more than ten years old.

On its own that indicates fundamental problems with the Windows and PC markets for Microsoft and their manufacturing partners.

The irrelevant operating system

One of the effects of increased computer life cycles is that the operating system has become irrelevant. Customers no longer care about what they are using as long as it works.

This is one of Microsoft’s problems; the virus epidemic of last decade and various clunky versions of Windows Phones has left customers perceiving PC and Windows software as being clunky and buggy.

Not yet dead

While the PC market is now shrinking, it’s far from dead. There’s still a huge demand to cater for although the big growth days are over.

For manufacturers whose business model has been based on fighting for market share in a growing sector, they now have a problem. They have to identify profitable niches and generate innovative products.

Unfortunately for the PC industry, the market has moved on. Apple have captured the bulk of the high margin computer sector and the industry’s response of pushing “ultrabooks” to capture the MacBook Air customers isn’t going to resonate with consumers trained to buy cheap systems.

Watching the PC industry over the next five years will be fascinating. Some companies will adapt, others will reinvent themselves and many will fade away as they cling to a declining business model.

Despite the personal computer industry only being 30 years old, it’s already in decline which is something older industries should ponder upon.

Are KPI’s a business evil?

How misplaced bonuses, incentives & performance indicators can damage a business

One of the cornerstones of 1980s management theories is offering staff incentives for performing to certain benchmarks.

While the theory is good, it can go badly wrong. I encountered this personally when at PC rescue we started selling computers systems and, to encourage sales, offered our technicians a commission on any they sold.

Quickly we started getting negative feedback from customers, some didn’t like what they perceived as a hard sell and some believed technicians were more interested in selling a computer rather than fixing the problems.

In a few cases it turned out the customers’ suspicions were correct; we found some the techs had decided it was quicker and more profitable for them to sell a new system rather than to fix the problem they had been sent out to resolve.

We had to change our KPIs and it taught me a good lesson about assuming how staff will respond to incentives.

Courier companies are good example of what happens when incentives and performance indicators go wrong, all of us have had examples of deliveries going wrong because the drivers are under pressure to meet targets. In the worst case, you might get your computer monitor thrown over the front gate.

The systems that encourage this sort of behaviour can damage entire industries, as we’ve seen with the used car industry. For individual businesses, poorly implemented commission based structures, like ours was, eventually build distrust which is one of the reason why electronic stores like Best Buy are struggling.

Google’s recent changes to search are another illustration of what can go wrong with poorly thought out incentives with CEO Larry Page reported to have tied staff bonuses to “success” in social. As a consequence Google are prepared to damage their core business as employees scramble to meet their targets.

The definition of ‘success’ is part of the problem with performance indicators, a government agency I did some work with defines successful worker as having a hundred meetings a year which has some predictable results in how that department operates.

On the bigger level, badly thought out incentive structures are damaging our economy as senior managers are driven to deliver short term objectives while ignoring the long term growth of their business and sometimes even damaging the wider community in the process.

Probably the ultimate level of damaged performance reward is the political system those of us in the ‘developed world’ have allowed to develop in the last fifty years; by rewarding politicians on being elected, we have a generation of leaders who are very good at winning elections but not terribly good at running governments.

While there’s little we can do about governments beyond being careful with our votes, we can watch our businesses closely to see what indicators and rewards work best for us.

Planned and monitored properly, bonuses and performance indicators can work well for a business blindly using inappropriate ones though often turns out to do more harm than good.

Why the Microsoft Faithful are wrong about Windows Phone

Is it too late for Microsoft beat Apple and Google in mobile phones?

Late last year an event organiser recounted how she’d been told to only approaching Microsoft for event sponsorship if the occasion was related to mobile telephony as “all of our marketing budgets are focused on Windows Phone.”

So it wasn’t a surprise to read at the beginning of this year that Microsoft were allocating $200 million for marketing Windows Phone in the US alone.*

The Consumer Electronics Show is the high temple of tech journalism with thousands flying in from around the world to breathlessly report on the latest wide screen gizmo or mobile device

At the 2010 show, 3D television was going to be the big consumer item while at the 2011 event it was going to be Android based tablets that were going to crush the Apple iPad.

Despite the millions of words written and spoken about these products, both flopped. So it was no surprise we were going to see plenty of coverage of Microsoft given the budgets available and it being the last time Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, would give the CES keynote.

Microsoft’s CES publicity blitz kicked off with a rather strange profile of Microsoft’s CEO in BusinessWeek which if anything illustrated the isolation and other worldliness of the company’s senior management.

The PR blitz worked though with Microsoft tying for first place in online mentions during the show according to the analytics company Simply Measured.

After the show the PR love for Microsoft continues with Business Insider having a gorgeous piece about why Windows Phone will succeed and criticising tech blogger Robert Scoble’s view that the mobile market is all about the number of apps available.

Scoble replied on his Google+ page explaining why apps do matter and adding that most of the people he meets hate Windows Phones, the latter point not being the most compelling argument.

The most telling point of Scoble’s though is his quoting Skype’s CEO that they aren’t developing an app for Windows Phone as “the other platforms are more important, so he put his developers on those”.

Microsoft spent 8.5 billion dollars buying Skype and intends to lay out over $200 million promoting Windows Phone. Surely there’s a few bucks somewhere in those numbers to pay for a few developers to get Skype functionality on the new platform.

Since writing this, Robert Scoble has issued a correction from the Skype CEO stating a version is being built for the next version of Windows Phone

The fact Microsoft can’t organise this seems to indicate not all senior executives share the vision for Windows Phone. It’s difficult to image Google or Apple having this sort of public dissent on a key product.

Management issues aside, Microsoft’s real problem are they are late to the mobile party and don’t have anything to gain attention.

There’s nothing wrong about being late to the party – Apple were late to enter the MP3 player, smart phone and tablet markets – but in each case they bought something new that changed the sector and eventually gave them leadership of each sector.

With Windows Phone, there’s so far little evidence Microsoft are going to deliver anything radically new to the sector. With Apple’s iOS and Android dominating, it’s going to be a tough slog for Microsoft and they are going to have to have to carefully spend every cent of that big marketing budget.

At least Microsoft’s PR team is doing a great job, the challenge is for the rest of the organisation to sell it as well.

*As an aside, it’s interesting the author of that article about Microsoft’s marketing budgets boasts how he “been sitting on this information for weeks so that Microsoft can make its big announcement at CES this coming week”. It’s good to know where Paul Thurrott thinks his responsibilities lie – certainly not with his readers.

Has Google peaked?

Does altering a business’ core product destroy trust in a business?

This article originally appeared in Technology Spectator as Google’s Wavering Trust Presumption.

Google revolutionised the Internet when the service appeared just over a decade ago, the search engine’s clean and reliable results saw it quickly capture two thirds of the market from then competitors like Altavista and Yahoo!.

One of the keys to that success was trust – Google’s users had a fair degree of confidence that the service’s results would be an accurate representation of whatever they were looking for on the web.

With the continuing integration of social media services, local search, paid advertising and travel services into those search results, it’s time to ask whether we can continue to trust what Google delivers us.

Google’s attempt to become a social media service is seeing results being skewed with by Google Plus profiles. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan yesterday illustrated how Google+ profiles are changing Google’s search results.

One thing that notable in these searches – and Google’s behaviour in enforcing “real names” on its Plus social media service – is the importance of brands and celebrities.

It’s no coincidence in the example Danny Sullivan shows above that typing “Brit” into a Google search comes up with the instant suggestions of Brittany Spears and British Airways.

More troubling is Google’s foray into travel with the purchase of travel software company ITA. The travel industry site Tnooz recently looked at how searches for flights is now returning results from Google’s own service before the airlines or other travel websites.

Another of Google’s search strengths was the clean interface. When advertising was introduced, most users accepted this was the cost of a free service. Today a search result on Google is cluttered with Google+ suggestions, local business locations, travel results along with the ubiquitious advertising.

Suddenly Google’s search results aren’t looking so good and when you do find them, you can’t be sure they haven’t been skewed by the search engine’s determination to kill Google, Facebook or the online travel industry.

If it were only search and online advertising that Google was tinkering with, we could excuse this as being an innovative company experimenting with new business models in a developing industry, but a bigger problem lies outside its core business.

The purchase of Motorola Mobility – which is still subject to US government approval – changes the game for Google. Motorola Mobility employs 19,000 staff, increasing Google’s headcount by 60%.

Even if Google has only bought Motorola for the patents, closing down or divesting the operations and laying off nearly twenty thousand staff would be a big enough management distraction but there is real possibility though that Google want to make phones.

Google as a phone manufacturer, their previous attempt with the Nexus One wasn’t a great success, creates the problem of channel conflict with its partners who sell mobile phones with the Android operating system installed.

Right now those partners are having great success selling phones through mobile telcommunications companies who desperately want an alternative to the iPhone given they perceive, quite correctly, that Apple is taking their customers and the associated profits.

Apart from Apple the incumbents of the mobile phone industry are failing as Motorola have given up and are selling themselves to Google while Nokia are desperately seeking salvation in the arms of Microsoft.

Microsoft’s failure to take advantage of Google’s missteps is also instructive. Microsoft seem to be unable to capitalise on the conflicts in the mobile handset industry with Windows Phone while their competing search engine, Bing, seems to following Google’s cluttered inferface and anti-competitive practices.

With Microsoft largely out of the way with as an innovative competitor, it has fallen on newer business to challenge Google.

In social media we clearly have Facebook and Twitter while in phones Apple is by far the biggest and most profitable opponent, something emphasised by Google giving Android away for free.

The biggest question though is who can replace Google in web search, while there are worthy attempts like DuckDuckGo, Blekko and even Microsoft Bing, it’s difficult to see one of these displacing the dominant player right now.

Which isn’t to say it can’t happen; as we see with the examples of Nokia, Motorola and possibly Microsoft, the speed of change in modern business means empires fall quickly.

For Google, the lack of management focus on their core businesses may well cost them dearly in the next few years if web users stop trusting the company’s search results.