Glen -
I appreciate your analysis here at several levels (assuming I actually
sorted it correctly), it is nicely dense and layered, appropriate for my
particular palate at least.
I'm very interested in the desire to and the frustration surrounding
_not_ being able to "figure Google out".
It *is* entertaining.
I can certainly see it from a single tightly focused quantifiable
predictibility measure ... like whether to buy a company's stock.
Obviously (to me?) Owen's (and the others discussing such things) stake
is not whether to buy GOOG but rather whether to invest one's
personal/professional energy and attention in learning/using/integrating
their tools into one's workflow (or Digital Ecology as Owen is wont to say).
But
without that tight use case, and with a large multi-national beast with
layers of varying liability, impact, presentation, etc., they strike me
as complex beasts. Each aspect from which you measure them will present
different, perhaps even incommensurate results.
Absolutely... and secondarily to considering Google and how/when/if/why
you might integrate their products/systems into your workflow/ecology,
there is the more speculative questions of "what would I develop if I
were GOOG" or "since I am not GOOG but the ARE the 800lb gorilla, where
do the tools I might develop fit into whatever oddly shaped phase-space
is left after GOOG takes theirs?"
I know this was the
case while I was working for Lockheed Martin. It was especially vivid
to me since I was on loan to Vought systems at an old air base working
on aircraft avionics, on loan from the missiles division, which recently
bought Vought and which had been recently bought by Loral, which was
soon to be bought by Lockheed Martin.
I could no more imagine "figuring Lockheed Martin out" than I could
imagine "figuring out C. Elegans".
This is a moderately apt analogy. My daughter (PhD microbiology living
in your neck of the woods... Portland/OHSU) were just using C. Elegans
as an example in another discussion over the weekend. In this case, C.
Elegans relative simplicity and ancient roots are roughly opposite
Google's complexity and very recent roots. Despite the gray hair
contributed by Andy Bechtolsheim, their *intellectual* roots are pretty
shallow compared to say... Lockheed or Martin (both established
1912?). On the other hand, GOOG *is* highly studied by many, though
arguably maybe less than AAPL or the ancient IBM.
Because of this, it strikes me that what you're expressing is some sort
of deep seated pattern recognition bias towards centralized planning.
You're looking for a homunculus inside a machine.
I'm not quite clear on this point. It sounds as if you are identifying
corporations such as LockMart and Google as being more like evolved
organisms than machines?
And that leads me to my fundamental gripe with web services. The whole
point of the open source movement was to put upstream causal power into
the hands of more people, to make the producer-consumer relationship
more symmetric. In web services, it seems like we, as consumers,
_still_ want asymmetric producer-consumer relationships.
This fits my biases as well... but apparently in a different way. There
are many services I am happy (smug) to provide for myself (heat and
water) and/or at least lust after being able to provide for myself
(electricity). There are others I suppose I am happy to defer to "the
cloud". While I *likely* am able to rebuild my starter motor or
alternator, I probably wouldn't be able to fabricate a good enough
bearing or brushes to do the rebuild and therefore depend on the "cloud"
including AC/Delco and many other industrials of that ilk to supply me
with such things. I definitely am happy that we have a Michelin and
Yokohama in the cloud, I can't imagine making tyres that would be useful
to me. Having a public/common Internet or even a private/common
telecomm or private electrical grid (cloud) are almost required... I'm
still holding out for a fully distributed mesh network to grow together
from it's many tiny patches (see the recent posting on Mesh networks
here) or a fully distributed electrical grid (home/neighborhood
solar/wind/???) but there are good (non political, non-social) reasons
that we didn't get broadly scalable infrastructure until it came from
one or a small handful of entities (public or private), behaving in a
"paternalistic" way for the most part.
GMail is a
great example. I hate GMail simply because I can't download the
software and run my _own_ GMail server on my own hardware ... similar to
SparkleShare, Tor, Wordpress, Drupal, etc.
Ma Bell used to provide handsets with phone service but eventually gave
over and allowed customers to procure their own, but I don't think they
ever offered customers the option of setting up their own switch
downtown (although I suppose the did allow/require big customers to set
up their own switchboards, etc). So maybe your example *does* apply
here... Ma Bell established the designs and standards for old-school
telephony (and telegraphy) as well as providing the actual service and
infrastructure itself, but eventually the actual hardware and services
got replaced by a myriad of cooperative/competitive providers.
If they allowed that, then I'd love GMail. And, if they did that, you
wouldn't have to worry about Google abandoning it, as long as it had a
sufficiently pure free agent following (like the role Debian plays for
Linux).
I'm not sure *that* follows... I suspect they could *still* abandon it
on a whim. You may be arguing that it would not be in their (obvious)
best interest but then you'd be up on the same soapbox as Doug (and no
matter how big, I'm sure that soapbox isn't big enough for the two of
you) who argues that delivering a smartphone whose
firmware/configuration won't allow BT and WiFi to run simultaneously is
a patently stupid move at many levels.
Or maybe I'm missing your point?
Why? Oh why? Do we insist on these soft paternalist producer-consumer
relationships? What's the underlying cause for people to prefer the
Raspberry Pie over Arduino? GMail over postfix?
Because we are Consumers? Why do Serfs defer to Lords who defer to Kings?
[sigh]
IMO the very best rants do end in a [sigh]. As with Dennis Miller
back in the day when he started with "Don't let me get off on a rant
here" and ended with
"Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong."
Carry On,
- Steve
Owen Densmore wrote at 03/14/2013 09:34 AM:
Good by Google Reader (which I use a lot):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371725
.. and a host of others in this year's Spring Cleaning
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html
I will give them this: they have an export stunt, and I apparently can
move to others. I don't use the google front page they killed off,
Yahoo instead.
But seriously, does anyone have a crystal ball? I just can't figure
Google out!
- Are they consolidating? .. i.e. converting everything to G+?
- What's next to go? .. Google Docs? It gets use by digerati, but few
others.
- Is GMail safe? .. It gets a lot of use, but its easy to scrape off the
ads, so can't be a profit center.
I'd certainly pay for many of google services .. although I doubt this
would stop them from randomly killing off ones I care about.
Is there some obvious trend, like I mentioned above, for example ..
moving everything to G+?
Damn!
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