ndanger.organism

Mitch Ratcliffe joins the Google Bashing meme with his ZDnet article Google: Does it have to be all FUD all the time?

My reaction is pretty well summed up by these two comments.
Basically: it’s not FUD.

But maybe Mitch has a point

Ratcliffe’s summary of Google’s recent announcements as “me and my friends are going to…” is accurate. It’s a departure from Google’s classic release policy:

1. Internet: I think Google’s going to do something cool
2. Google: no comment
3. …
4. Google: hey, try out this cool thing we just made
5. Internet: yay!

This strategy is easy to love: with no pre-announcements you never slip dates or under-release, and the internet hive-mind spends months guessing what you’re up to. Just s/Google/Apple/ to see how well this works. Unfortunately, it only works if

1. You don’t need anymore publicity
2. You’ve got enough cash to play around and release when you’re ready
3. You don’t need anyone else’s help

1 & 2: check, but what about 3? I suppose Google could have developed the gPhone hardware, and then tried to upset the cell-carriers phone-tie in deals to allow it to work on all networks, and then convinced the carriers to let them run all sorts of magic, and then… It seems like a lot of work to end up with another beautiful closed-platform appliance. Something like, I dunno, an iPhone.

Commodities

Google’s search engine needs commodity PC’s to generate cheap computing power and commodity browsers (interfacing a commodity web) to allow everyone to click ads. Google doesn’t want to sell gPhone hardware, they want to make phones a commodity. A phone might be smaller or a carrier more reliable, but if they all run Android Google can run their secret sauce–location based ads or call-pattern analysis or… something. Whatever it is, it will probably benefit from the Network Effect, so making sure everyone is running your platform is smart.

In theory, Google still could have kept everything quiet until they had a reference implementation and agreement from a carrier, but what are the chances their consortium would have agreed to that? The publicity also helps attract vendors: everyone wants to back a winner.

Speaking of the network effect…

What about OpenSocial? If social apps are like desktop applications and the social networks are operating systems, then the network effect will be extremely strong: users want to use networks with apps, developers write apps for networks with lots of users. Albert-László Barabási’s called these “winner take all” networks (no direct link, unfortunately. You’ll have to search the page).

According to Barbasi, Windows’ surfed the winner-take-all effect to 90% market share. If Google is worried about Facebook snatching ad revenue with “social ads” they have to respond to Facebook’s API. And if they actually want to be competitive, they need a coalition: developers aren’t going to fall all over themselves wooing the 7 Orkut users.

So it’s all copacetic?

Er, well it’s not FUD. But at the same time it’s not fun. Classic Google was characterized by happy super-technology fun-time. As in “they get to spend 1 day a week working on whatever they want? And they do it on a massive computing cluster? Sign me up!” Announcing a consortium without any whiz-bang examples has more of a “great, another press release” vibe. It brings up the image of MBA’s sitting around a table with their marketing firm trying to come up with hot logos and product tie-ins. If you need another example of some Google’s non-excitingness…

Man Edward Tufte must be gnashing his teeth.

On the other hand… watch that video again and ignore the talking. Android looks super cool. And you can download the dev kit! And win 10 million dollars!

As Google grows it’s easy to pre-judge them as threatening/stupid/evil/irrelevant/etc. but hard to actually objectively determine their direction and motives. I’ve loved Google’s past products and think Android looks cool (I don’t know enough to judge OpenSocial). So while I’m worried about how Google will handle their future growth but I’m not writing them off yet.