Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: google

  • Goodbye to Yahoo!

    Goodbye to Yahoo!

    And so Yahoo!’s journey comes to an end with the company being renamed Altba and most of its operating assets given over to Verizon.

    With the changes both CEO Marissa Mayer and original co-founder David Filo will leave Altba’s slimmed down board.

    Mayer’s failure is a lesson that being an early employee at a successful, fast growth tech startup isn’t a measure of leadership. It may even be a hindrance given companies like Google were inventing new industries during her tenure there which develops different management skills to what a business like Yahoo! needs.

    The biggest lesson of Yahoo!’s demise is how even the most powerful online brands isn’t immune from disruption itself, with what was once the internet’s most popular website being eclipsed by Google and Facebook.

    Interestingly, as Quartz reports, Yahoo! is still one of the US’s most popular sites and only slightly behind Google and Facebook in unique monthly views.

    Despite this, Yahoo! has struggled to grow for 15 years and has struggle to make money although it remains a four billion dollar a year business.

    Which shows eyeballs aren’t enough for a mature web business, at some stage it has to show a return to justify its valuations.

    Among Yahoo!’s many properties remain some gems like Flickr and it will be interesting to watch what Verizon does with them. Sadly any successes will be tiny compared to what the company once promised.

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  • Shipping dead products

    Shipping dead products

    A scathing review of Google Home raises questions about the company’s ability to ship hardware and its executives’ commitment to consumer markets.

    “I was so excited,” recalls Business Insider’s Ben Gilbert about the announcement of the revamped Google Home last may. Sadly, he found the device lacking integration with the rest of the company’s services and unreliable in connecting with his Wi-Fi network.

    He returned the device and now vows to wait until “AI technology to improve dramatically.”

    While Gilbert may wait, the market won’t with Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri cementing their market positions and a range of startups promising to change the market.

    Google – or Alphabet’s – failure to execute with the Home product should worry shareholders as the company has shown it hasn’t been good at getting consumer devices to the market and the organisation’s notorious management attention deficit disorder seems to have crippled this device very early in its development, a far from good sign.

    The Google Pixel smartphone shows the company is capable of shipping good products, but that commitment has to extend across all their hardware and consumer software products.

    In highly competitive market with well cashed up and focused competitors like Amazon, Facebook and Apple, Google will have to ensure good products are shipped in their name. Substandard will not survive in this marketplace.

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  • Trusting the web

    Trusting the web

    Following last week’s US election attention has fallen onto the role of Facebook in influencing public opinion and the role of rumours and fake news.

    The CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, says claims that his company’s news feed influenced the US election are nonsense but, as Zeynep Tufekci the New York Times writes, the platform has shown in its own experiments that the service does influence voters.

    Sadly misinformation is now the norm on the web given anyone can start a blog and post ridiculous and outlandish claims. If that misinformation fits a group’s beliefs, then it may be shared millions of times as people share it across social media services, particularly Facebook.

    Facebook’s filter bubbles exacerbates that problem as each person’s news feed is determined by what the company’s algorithm thinks the user will ‘like’ rather than something that will inform or enlighten them.

    Those ‘filter bubbles’ tend to reinforce our existing biases or prejudices and when fake news sites are injected into our feeds Facebook becomes a powerful way of confirming our beliefs, something made worse by friends gleefully posting fake quotes or false news that happens to fit their world views. If you click ‘Like’, you’ll then get more of them.

    Over time, Facebook risks becoming irrelevant if the news being fed from the site becomes perceived as being unreliable

    For Facebook, and for other algorithm driven services like Google, the risks in fake news don’t just lie in a loss of credibility, there’s also the risk of regulatory problems when news manipulation starts affecting markets, commercial interests or threatens established power bases.

    The fake news problem is something that affects the entire web and its users, for Facebook and Google it is becoming a serious issue.

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  • Google’s grab for the smartphone market

    Google’s grab for the smartphone market

    This week Google released its latest smartphone, the Pixel, to mixed reviews. Controlling the most popular mobile operating system, Android, isn’t enough for the company.

    As Microsoft found, just supplying the operating systems for smartphones isn’t enough to influence the market. Apple, along with Nokia and Blackberry before them, showed that the path to both controlling the segment and being profitable relies on having devices designed for their software.

    Given the Pixel’s price point, it’s unclear how well it will do against the iPhone, Samsung’s models or the plethora of Chinese devices but for all the Android ecosystem’s players, having its controlling owner running in opposition to them can’t be comforting.

    Again though Microsoft’s experience is instructive, and encouraging, for the broader Android community as Microsoft’s attempts to push out Windows CE devices failed dismally. For Google to be successful where Microsoft failed would require a degree of corporate discipline the search engine giant is not renown for.

    In the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft strength was licensing and controlling access to the operating system. Android’s strength in the smartphone world is that Google doesn’t have the same veto power. To be able to exercise control over the market, Google needs a big device share.

    Ultimately though the success of the Google Pixel smartphone will depend on how many users will adopt it. It may be time for another round of smartphone subsidy wars.

     

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  • Google scraps Project Ara

    Google scraps Project Ara

    Project Ara, Google’s experimental modular phone, seems to be doomed reports Reuters.

    Sadly this isn’t surprising as the indications of Ara’s demise have been around for a year.

    In some ways this isn’t surprising as Google retreated from the smartphone market at the beginning of 2014 with its sale of the Motorola handset business, the company’s notorious attention deficit disorder wouldn’t have helped the project’s survival chances either.

    Should Reuter’s report be true, then Google’s management will have shown again that the company isn’t prepared to stick with long term research projects and that journalists, not to mention researchers and developers, need to treat the company’s programs with some scepticism.

    For the Ara team, they’ve no doubt learned a lot in developing this project and it will be interesting to see how that knowledge is applied to other products, few of which will belong to Google.

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