Google’s dominant status in search and online advertising is not long for this world. Depending on your definition of “long.”
A comment on Valleywag from a disgruntled ex-employee is probably typical of what happens when an organization gets big. Now, of course, Google isn’t all the way dysfunctional – far from it – but big organizations get slow, and this is some evidence that the process is underway.
For my own part, I’m a fan of Google and a user of AdSense on WashingtonWatch.com, but I haven’t run any AdWords ads in months. It’s too complicated for a person like me, who has a lot of competing demands on his time, to run a campaign that I’m confident can be cost-effective. There’s room for a fresh, clean alternative to AdWords, and it’ll be interesting to see who comes up with it.
For those transfixed by the Google juggernaut, remember: This too shall pass.
Ars has a good article reminding us of an important fact about peer-to-peer tools like BitTorrent: while they certainly can be used for illegal and unethical purposes, they’re ultimately just tools. They also have indisputably legal and legitimate uses—in this case, rapidly deploying software updates on a campus network. One of the reasons that stopping piracy is only going to get harder over time is that as peer-to-peer tools mature, it will become more and more difficult to distinguish “good” and “bad” peer-to-peer tools. The tools will be increasingly ubiquitous and powerful, and there won’t be any easy way for the authorities to restrict their use to legal purposes.
I think this is one reason that the Grokster decision (in which I reluctantly concluded that the plaintiffs had the better argument) is likely to be a pyrrhic victory for the copyright industry. The Supreme Court said that if there’s clear evidence that a company’s product is designed to facilitate file-sharing, then that company can be held liable for contributory infringement. But that test makes it pretty easy to avoid liability. BitTorrent appears to be navigating it successfully, and others will doubtless do the same.
Arrington reports that a G-mail archiver called G-Archiver, which backs up all of your Gmail emails to your hard drive, sends every user’s email address and password to the creator’s own email account, giving him access to all of their Gmail messages. And he observes:
That has led a number of experts to conclude that Google Apps can never be a real threat to Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint. All of the sensitive business information of a company, if stored on Google’s servers, is just a password guess, or in this case what is effectively a phishing scam, away.
This reprises his earlier observation (which I amplified here) that “unauthorized document access is a simple password guess or government ‘request’ away.”
Looking down the horizon, I don’t see why it’s better to have computing and storage done remotely. Better security (for the corporation and individual alike) will come from owning and physically controlling your storage and computing. The winners won’t be the providers of computing in the cloud (think Google); it’ll be the ones who make the portable and easy-to-use devices (think Apple).
I’m stuck in the Charlotte airport, and I wanted to give some kudos to the good people of Charlotte for making WiFi access available in their airport for free. In this case, I’m stranded in Charlotte for a couple of hours, so I probably would have plunked down the requisite $7.99 if they’d asked for it. But in the vast majority of cases, where I’m in the airport for an hour or less before my flight, the fee discourages me from using the connection. This is a pure deadweight loss for the world, denying Internet access to a lot of people in order to squeeze a few dollars out of the handful willing to pay an inflated price for access. It’s good to see Charlotte buck the trend, and I hope my own airport follows Charlotte’s lead.
At the Burton Group Identity Blog, Mark Diodati has a write-up of Microsoft’s acquisition of Credentica.
Microsoft’s Kim Cameron and Stefan Brands of Credentica are two people I know to be doing important work in the identity area. I featured Stefan in the final chapter of my book, Identity Crisis. I believe both are working to make identity and credentialing systems that support secure transacting without promoting surveillance – no easy task.
Perhaps this summer, I will have time to translate the technical details of their work into libertarian English and report more about it.
Ben Worthen has a post looking at restrictions on the use of consumer technologies in businesses. Apparently, a lot of corporate IT departments have found it necessary to ban a lot of consumer applications like Skype, webmail, and the iPhone from their networks because they’re required to monitor and record all of their employees’ communications, and it’s hard to do that with applications that aren’t specifically designed with employer monitoring in mind. This strikes me as profoundly stupid. If the goal is to prevent employees from leaking confidential information, this kind of ad hoc monitoring isn’t going to get the job done. Employees will always be able to find some application that lets them transfer files (the IT manager Worthen interviewed admits that there are some additional sites she’d like to block but hasn’t yet). And even if the computers are totally locked down, they can still write down confidential information with a pen and paper and carry it out of the office. The bottom line is that an employee determined to violate his employer’s trust will find a way to do so no matter what the IT department does.
Apparently, though, this is what securities law requires. So you can’t really blame the IT departments for complying with the law. But it’s worth noting that this is more a quirk of a few regulated industries (health care is another where information-disclosure is tightly controlled) rather than a general property of American business. If your company isn’t in one of these industries, it probably doesn’t make sense to impose these kinds of draconian restrictions. And Congress might want to re-think regulations that require companies to behave this way.
I’m a big fan of Chris Anderson and his magazine Wired. So I eagerly read his new cover story and preview of his forthcoming book, both entitled “Free!”
Anderson begins with the story of King Gillette, famous for his give-away-the-razor-and-sell-the-blades business model. Anderson classifies this form of “free” as a cross-subsidy.
Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It’s as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)
You know this freaky land of free as the Web.
But why are digital and information technologies fundamentally different than massy goods? And why do they make “free” business models far more widespread, or even dominant?
To explain, Anderson goes to the source — of both the technology, literally, and of the imaginative economic concept that propelled the technology far beyond its initial potential. You see, Carver Mead not only did the research behind Gordon Moore’s Law, and named it, but he also (1) created the VLSI manufacturing and design methodology to make very large scale integrated circuits possible and (2) envisioned that Moore’s Law could mean entirely new products, new industries, and even a new quantum digital economy.
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I agree with most of what Tom says here but I have to quibble with his final paragraph:
Oh, and one more thing: it’s probably worth noting that one of the greatest technical (and economic) triumphs in recent memory — TCP/IP and the suite of other protocols and standards that powers the internet — was designed by having a bunch of really smart engineers get together, execute an RFC process and then issue an ISO standard more or less by fiat. This is not to say that markets can’t help us arrive at good solutions — cable vs. DSL vs. FiOS is a good example of such a market working (or would be if the regulatory picture weren’t so complicated). But it ought to be acknowledged that markets are not always an optimal tool for making technical decisions. In fact there are now pseudo-centralized organizations that take responsibility for many of the technical standards that power our world, and nearly all engineers agree that we’re vastly better off for it.
The history of the Internet is something I’ve been researching lately, so this is a question I know something about. And I think Tom’s only telling part of the story.
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I have to at least partly agree with Tom about the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray battle, and about libertarians’ tendency to sometimes over-sell the outcome of market processes. Libertarians have been known to go overboard in insisting that the outcome of market processes is superior to other potential outcomes in every conceivable respects, even when it’s clearly not so. To take the obvious example, as a Mac user, I’m not prepared to concede that simply because Microsoft has a larger share of the operating system market than Apple, that Windows must be a better operating system than Mac OS.
In particular, network effects and path dependence are real phenomena. For example, the x86 architecture really is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster that has limped along for decades despite, not because of, its underlying technical design. Yet it has become the undisputed champion of desktop computing because of network effects—there is now vastly more desktop software written for it than any other architecture, and so that’s what the market demands. From the perspective of an electrical engineer, this is kind of a pity. Newer architectures like the Alpha have a variety of advantages, and if we could somehow wave a magic wand and cause everyone to suddenly have an installed base of Alpha software instead of x86 software, it would almost certainly be an improvement.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.