Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: google

  • Is Twitter’s censorship a good thing?

    Is Twitter’s censorship a good thing?

    Since Twitter announced they were going to start blocking messages on a country by country basis if required by the laws of that land they have received a lot of criticism.

    Most of this criticism of Twitter revolves around the belief that every message should only edited or deleted by the person who posted the tweet.

    Anything else a breach of free speech and a threat to the underlying principles of the internet.

    That utopian view of the Internet doesn’t translate into real life; the online world is as subject to laws as any other part of life and social media companies have to comply with the same laws as newspaper organisations or fast food chains.

    Regardless of what you think of those laws – and in many countries they certainly are unreasonable and oppressive – they do matter.

    Were Twitter not to comply then the entire service would be at least blocked in those countries and, should an action be enforced in a US court, then the tweet removed anyway for every user around the world.

    By introducing country specific blocking, the service can let the rest of the world see a tweet that would otherwise be lost and in countries with restrictive or authoritarian laws, local people can still use the service.

    A particularly clever way of dealing with removal requests is to note that the specific message has been blocked in a country. This adds a level of transparency and accountability to the actions of courts and governments that want to close the service.

    We can see that being particularly effective in jurisdictions like the UK where British judges have been quick to apply “superinjunctions” preventing the merest mention of something by anybody.

    Should Britain’s overeager judges start demanding Twitter block tweets, those in the UK will quickly realise something is amiss. The effect will probably be to increase the interest in the blocked tweets that can be seen anywhere around the world.

    Despite the utopian view that transparency and openess will solve the world’s problems, we don’t live in that world right now and people can – rightly or wrongly – ask that false, defamatory and damaging posts on the Internet can be removed.

    Interestingly Google this morning announced they will be introducing a similar system to deal with country specific problems on their blogger platform.

    Twitter’s handled this in the best way possible, in many ways this could be a step forward for social media and the Internet in general.

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  • Can you trust your friends?

    Can you trust your friends?

    I remember the first time I heard about Google, it was in the run up to the year 2000 and my radio segments were mainly discussing if computers would blow up, dams collapse or aircraft fall from the sky as computer systems failed to deal with the change into the new millennium.

    Despite the risk of impending disaster, I had a play with Google search and found the results to be far better than the established sites like Yahoo! and Altavista. Millions of others agreed.

    Quickly Google became the definitive search engine. If you were serious about finding information on the web then Google was the way you found it.

    For a while we wondered how Google would make money, it turned out that linking advertising to the search results was immensely profitable and the company quickly became one of the richest in the world.

    Today, Google’s decided their searches will be something else. Rather than being a trusted source they’ll tell us what our friend think.

    Which is great if our friends are trusted sources on Aristotle, post colonial South American politics, how to book sleepers on the Trans-Siberian or the best pie shop in Bathurst. But it’s kind of tricky if they aren’t.

    As much as I love and enjoy the company of my friends both online and offline, not many of them are authorities in anything – except possibly pie shops.

    This the flaw at the heart of integrating search and social media, they are two different things and we have different expectations for them.

    As Pando Daily’s MG Seigler puts it; “Evil, Greed, And Antitrust Aren’t Google’s Real Problems, Relevancy Is.”

    For most of my online searches, my friends views and ideas aren’t relevant. If they are, I already know how to find them.

    The prediction is that tinkering with search will not end well for Google, it’s hard to disagree if we lose confidence in their results.

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  • The Internet’s cold war

    The Internet’s cold war

    “We’re designing exclusively for Android devices,” the software developer confided over a beer, “we don’t like the idea of giving Apple 30% of our income.”

    That one business owner is making a choice that software developers, newpaper chains, school text book publishers and many other fields are going to have to make in the next year – which camp are they going to join in the Internet’s cold war.

    As the web matures, we’re seeing four big empires develop – Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon which are going to demand organisations and consumers make a choice on who they will align with.

    That decision is going to be painful for a lot of business; each empire is going to take a cut in one way or another with Apple’s iStore charges being the most obvious.

    For those who choose to go the non-aligned path – develop in HTML5 and other open web standards things will be rocky and sometimes tough. At least those on the open net won’t have to contend with a “business partner” whose objectives may often be different to their own.

    Over time, we’ll see the winners and losers but for the moment businesses, particularly big corporations and publishers should have no doubt that the choices they make today on things as seemingly trivial things like reader comments may have serious ramifications in a few years time.

    Consumers aren’t immune from this either; those purchases through iTunes, Amazon or Google are often locked to that service for a reason.

    Probably the development that we should watch closest right now is Apple’s push into education publishing; those governments, universities and schools that lock into the iPad platform are making a commitment on behalf of tax payers, faculty and students that will affect all of them for many years.

    For many, it might be worthwhile hedging the bets and sticking to open standards. A decision to join one or two of the big Internet empires is something that shouldn’t be made lightly.

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  • The end of the PC era

    The end of the PC era

    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.

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  • Has Google peaked?

    Has Google peaked?

    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.

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