Corporations and Hypocrisy: Inconvenient truths about Google
Mon, May 31, 10
Google evangelist Tim Bray, whose Twitter jihad against Apple’s “curated computing” dissected here earlier, says:
Kontra genuinely loathes Google right down to the ground.
This, incredibly, is the same man who started his Google “evangelism” gig with the words “I hate it” referring to Apple and its App Store policies. In his new Corporations and Emotions post, he says I hate him essentially because I hate his employer, Google.
I know it’s a currently popular meme, but what’s with all this “hating” business? I neither hate Bray nor his employer. What I wrote speaks for itself, so I see no need to explain anything further, but just in case he’s not familiar with the history of this blog, though, I have covered and praised Google on many occasions in this space, on Twitter and elsewhere: Google shows Microsoft how to connect the dots, to cite one example.
Mine isn’t anthropomorphized corporate enmity. It’s simply exposing deliberate, pervasive and sustained hypocrisy. An example of a search and ad monopolist trying to misdirect public attention away from its own proprietary and opaque cashcows by an obsessive use of the “open” mantra. If Bray dismisses that as “hating” Google, so be it.
Bray is quick to reassure us about Google:
I can testify with some force that at Google there is a notable lack of conspiratorial intent to Do Bad Things With All That Data, but then you might choose to discount that testimony because of the logo on my paycheck.
For a high visibility person who gets paid specifically to promote his company to claim he doesn’t agree with major policies of his employer would be an unacceptable ruse. So let’s briefly consider, not Bray’s necessarily biased opinion of his employer, but public statements by notable Googlers. Because in the Googleplex alternate reality:
Google CEO Eric Schmidt, on CNBC never said: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Google’s European competition counsel Julia Holtz never said: “If someone forced us to [disclose how our search advertising business works], it would destroy our product.”
Google SVP, Product Management Jonathan, Rosenberg, never said: “In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in. Not to mention the fact that opening up these systems would allow people to ‘game’ our algorithms to manipulate search and ads quality rankings, reducing our quality for everyone.”
Google CEO Erich Schmidt, at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, never said: “Would you prefer someone else?…Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?” when asked why we should trust Google with all the data it collects on us.
Google CEO Erich Schmidt never blamed users for the Google Buzz privacy fiasco : “I would say that we did not understand how to communicate Google Buzz and its privacy…There was a lot of confusion when it came out on Tuesday, and people thought that somehow we were publishing their email addresses and private information, which was not true. I think it was our fault that we did not communicate that fact very well, but the important thing is that no really bad stuff happens in the sense that nobody’s personal information was disclosed.”
Google never denied and, when caught red handed, never admitted to snooping WiFi data either.
And so on.
Apparently, I “hate” Google since I criticized it, but obviously Google is not in the business of “hating” others like Apple because:
Google VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra never raised the prospect of Apple as Big Brother: “If Google didn’t act, it faced a draconian future where one man, one phone, one carrier were our choice…That’s a future we don’t want.”
Google VP of Engineering and head of Android, Andy Rubin never compared Apple to a totalitarian regime:
“When they can’t have something, people do care. Look at the way politics work. I just don’t want to live in North Korea.”
And, of course, Tim Bray never started his career at Google by “hating” Apple, as his first public pronouncement.
Clearly, there’s no pattern of hypocrisy here. The problem is me, not Google. I’m “hiding behind [an] (albeit stylish) alias” and I’m an “anomaly,” as Bray puts it. Declaring opponents as being emotional, irrational fanboys, crippled by hate is a classic tactic of marginalization. Yes, it’s all my fault, I really should just let the Tim Brays, Andy Rubins and Vic Gundotras of this world convince everyone what’s good for Google is good for America.
P.S. I don’t work for Apple and never did, but a bit of gratuitous advice to Tim Bray by way of paraphrasing Steve Jobs: “For Google to win, it doesn’t need to demonize Apple.”
Apple, Google and the map wars
Tue, May 25, 10
About a year ago, openplaces.com founder Fred Lalonde tweeted about Apple secretly acquiring the company that made Pushpin, a mapping API his company was using:
That company was Placebase, as described by its CEO Jaron Waldman in this video two years ago:
Map-tile checkers game
Most Cupertino watchers saw in Apple’s Placebase acquisition an opportunity to kick another Google property off its mobile devices. Unfortunately, Placebase is a dataset integrator over maps, not a provider of actual map tiles, of which there are only a few independent ones left in the world.
In 2007, for example, Nokia bought Navteq for $8.1 billion and TomTom paid Tele Atlas NV €2.6 billion in 2008. Mobile being the next frontier in mapping, Yahoo and Nokia announced yesterday a partnership where Navteq will provide Yahoo’s map and navigation services globally. Despite all this market activity, the most popular service still remains Google Maps.
While Google Maps was squarely aimed at consumers at its introduction in 2005, Placebase took a different route by integrating public and private datasets over data tiles targeting more sophisticated business applications. Waldman told GigaOm two years ago:
Google Maps is great for consumer usage, but we are making it easy for large companies to take our Maps API, customize it and then use it. We are being used for real estate, fleet tracking and traffic.
One of those white-label partners that used Pushpin APIs was PolicyMap, which has a great demo section showing how Placebase layers datasets over maps:
Mapping the battle
Google’s declaration of war across Apple’s entire product line on the eve of WWDC and Apple’s rejection of Google Latitude location-aware mobile map app from the App Store last year sets the stage for a number of intriguing possibilities for how Apple might use Placebase:
- Apple may swap out Google from its Maps app on iPhones/iPads with another map data provider. There have been persistent rumors about Apple and Microsoft negotiating Bing search and map data services. (Google Maps does have some serious accuracy issues which the company will attempt to correct in a year-long effort starting this summer). While Google-to-Microsoft switch is somewhat unlikely in that Apple has already invested quite a bit of time integrating Google map services and renewed that effort with even better integration in the recently shipping iPads, all that was before the virulent anti-Apple crusade displayed at Google’s I/O developer conference last week.
- Apple also has the option of getting map tiles from other companies like MapQuest, the granddaddy of mapping services now owned by AOL or even the outright purchase of a map/navigation company like TomTom, as a low-ROI but defensive move. Placebase layers on top of raw map-data would abstract a new underlying service so that users may not even notice it (unless, of course, there are performance, accuracy or capability issues). Still, like online search, it’s not that easy to swap out a popular Google service without an equal or better one.
- Apple may continue to get Google map tiles over which it can graft increasingly more sophisticated and useful location services through the Placebase services. This would further differentiate Apple’s Maps app from Google offerings on Android and buy Apple more time to figure out how to disentangle itself from its Google dependencies.
- Perhaps Apple’s interest in Placebase was narrower and it simply bought talent to implement ancillary services like its Places features in iPhoto, iMovie, Aperture and potentially new apps yet to be introduced.
- Apple may have bought Placebase for its APIs which it may announce as part of an extended iPhone OS 4 framework next week at WWDC or later. This would give both Apple and App Store developers pervasive ability to integrate map/location services in a broad range of applications from advertising to marketing to analytics to social games. Rumored social networking apps like iGroups that recently surfaced in patents indicates Apple may indeed be getting serious about location-based infrastructure.
- Apple already has several patents covering macro-level location-based advertising/marketing and micro-level Near Field Computing exchange of identity/financial data for secure, instant and paperless payments. Placebase APIs could act as the visual underpinnings for the discovery of such services.
- Let’s also remember that Apple recently bought Siri which provides a dynamic framework to parse text and voice, breaking it down to actionable components to form complex searches from participating data providers. Spoken queries like “I want to see {A} nearby {B} only if it has {C}” can become far more intelligent if Siri and Placebase can neatly interweave to search/navigate/notify over Placebase data layers and use the familiar map interface for display.
Digital maps, once a wondrous novelty that started with Google Maps on the desktop, are no longer a mere destination app on mobile devices. Mapping frameworks are beginning to be tightly integrated at the OS level and maps are becoming primary UI conduits to ever more sophisticated location-based services. Apple’s acquisition of Placebase was an affirmation of that reality and, hopefully, we’ll get to see the early results next week.
DQ: What should we think of Apple-bashing App Store developers?
Fri, May 21, 10
[Daily Questions (DQs) — where we post one question per day for discussion — are back.]
Netherlands-based Layar is one of the better known ‘augmented reality’ mobile browsers that started out on Android. You can also find it the Apple App Store. Layar CEO Raimo van der Klein, however, isn’t a fan of Apple or AAPL.
From Raimo’s recent Twitter stream, following the Apple-bashing opening at Google’s I/O developer conference:
The next day, taking it up a notch:
Here we have a curious case of a CEO of an “App Store developer” literally advising people on Twitter to dump their Apple stock (on a day where AAPL gained $4.56/1.92% to $242.32). Raimo isn’t sure how or if Apple will survive the year, given his giddy outlook on the just-announced Google/Android news.
Clearly, Raimo has a right to hold his opinions and to try to short Apple’s stock in his own way. It’s also pretty obvious where he thinks the future of mobile apps is. He is a cross-platform developer, with no allegiance to an ecosystem which feeds him and his company.
When Apple looks after its own and its customers’ interests by essentially saying if you want to play in our garden you need to play with our tools and rules (think section 3.3.1), it’s branded as evil. When cross-platform developers display such naked disregard and active hostility towards Apple and its financial welfare that makes the App Store possible, what do we think about their mercenary attitude?
What should we think of Apple-bashing App Store developers?
Curated hypocrisy: How Google camouflages its attacks on Apple
Mon, May 17, 10
Last week, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps published Curated Computing: Designing For The Post-iPad Era where she observed:
“What’s revolutionary about the iPad is the experience that it delivers: The iPad is a new kind of PC that ushers in an era of Curated Computing.“
Not unexpectedly, this drew the attention of the anti-Apple echosystem that regards the Cupertino company as the evil incarnate who’s hellbent on destroying the “open web” by curating its users’ experience on Apple devices.
Taking the baton of anti-Apple venom from Adobe’s Lee (Go screw yourself Apple) Brimelow, Google’s newest evangelist Tim (I hate, hate Apple) Bray responded to Forrester’s “Curated Computing” notion with élan:
I shudder to the core.
In a series of tweets on Twitter, Bray piled on Apple with escalating snarkiness. Let’s review his misdirections away from Google’s own sins:
Curated computing: Who needs complexity?
Exactly, who needs complexity? Who does need complexity other than those who profit from mediating its ill effects on consumers? Who, for example, needs Byzantine complexity purposely injected into our legal, tax or health care systems? Who profits from the shameful complexity of our IT universe? Who benefits from the anti-virus industry? Who profits from the complexity of Facebook’s privacy settings, Oracle’s pricing structure or Microsoft’s SharePoint hairball? Who needs the complexity of users being forced to navigate through six different Android OS versions against a permutation of dozens and dozens of carriers, handset manufacturers and devices? Google would like you to believe users are craving for this complexity, just as Microsoft tried to convince you for the last two decades.
[John @gruber answers @timbray: I think this one actually nails it: "Curated computing: Who needs complexity?" Many use cases where we *don't* need complexity. Tim Bray responds:]
Agreed, many indeed, but freedom is too high a price.
Freedom? Whose freedom? The freedom of those who directly profit from the artificial complexity to continue as they please or the freedom of users who are being taxed by these parasites? Let’s ignore the absurdity of equating Apple’s banning of proprietary Flash with the abrogation of, say, the First Amendment, a real freedom.
Curated computing: Don’t bother your pretty little head, we’ll take care of what you see.
Just like Google telling the rest of the world: “If someone forced us to [disclose how our search advertising business works], it would destroy our product.” This from a company that’s currently being investigated by the European Commission for antitrust ramifications of its opaque search ranking algorithms and the resulting 90% monopolistic share of the European search market. Google knows best.
Curated computing: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Let’s open that curtain a bit. Here’s what Bray’s bosses and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page said in their The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine a few years ago:
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
It could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
It’s not as if, a decade later, the rest of the world can see what’s behind Google’s perfectly opaque and proprietary search and advertising curtain, is it? Can you say “link farms”and SEO? Do you really know what exactly Google does with your click-stream history? Did you know Google has been snooping on European WiFi transmissions until a few days ago even though the company denied it previously? Do you really know what the man behind the curtain is doing?
Curated computing: Admire the beautiful murals on the garden walls.
Or you can go “out there” to admire the graffiti on the…ground? In Google’s walled garden of advertising, for example, “cougars and cubs are out, but sugar daddies and sugar babies are in.” Google “will take care of” your sexual proclivities.
Curated computing: Freedom is over-rated.
So are utopias.
I, for one, welcome our new curatorial overlords.
Of course, no mention of our current overloads: complexity merchants.
Curated computing: What they have right now in China.
And what they also had in China just a few years ago when Bray’s employer Google went in three-monkey style to conduct commerce, despite all manner of people pleading the overlord of search/ad business not to.
Curated computing: Just fine if you’re the curator.
Google should know, its share of the search market hovers around 65-70% and its U.S. search advertising share is over 75%. If you’re the sole “curator” of AdSense/AdWords things should be just fine.
Curated computing: Your gated-exurban-community home on the Internet.
Perhaps the most pernicious proposition of the “everything must be open” crusade is the notion that curation is bad and anti-freedom. Soldiers of this crusade confuse freedom with competition. Our museums are not football-field sized warehouses where art objects are indiscriminately dumped and our magazines and blogs are not amorphous containers of randomly selected articles. Our classrooms, restaurants, hospitals and indeed all our civilized institutions are firmly reliant on curation of one kind or another. The goal should be for curators to compete, not for curation to be declared illegal and unholy by the “open” zealots.
Who’s behind the curtain?
Just as Adobe is desperately trying to yell at the world, “Don’t buy into Apple’s walled garden, get locked into our own proprietary Flash,” so is Google trying to misdirect consumers’ attention from its own monopolistic sins to Apple’s mobile platform where 100 million users voted with their own money to enjoy 200,000 apps. The evil man behind the curtain in this scenario is not Apple’s curation, it’s the frightening prospect of Google getting cut off from search and ad revenue derived from its naked domination of the search box on top of your web browser. That, unfortunately, doesn’t sound like an appealing public cry, hence the “Curated Computing” misdirection whining.
Adobe legal entanglements
Wed, May 5, 10
As a background to recent unconfirmed reports of Adobe asking the U.S. government to investigate Apple (presumably for excluding Flash from the App Store), here are a few of the legal cases by and against Adobe over the years:
- In the late 1980s, British high-end digital effects powerhouse Quantel sued Adobe for $138 million over patented aspects of its Paintbox it claimed Photoshop violated, but lost the case in 1997 due to prior art from Alvy Ray Smith, computer graphics pioneer and co-founder of Pixar.
- In 1998, the German printing systems giant Heidelberger sued Adobe for violating its photo retouching patents. The two companies settled out of court two years later.
- In 1998, Adobe settled its font software copyright and typeface designs case against The Learning Company Inc. for $2 million in damages.
- In 2000, Adobe sued Macromedia for having violated its “reconfigurable tabbed palette” patent to stop the launch of Macromedia’s Flash 5.0. The then Adobe president Bruce Chizen: “Adobe will not be the research and development department for its competitors.” Two years later, Adobe won damages of $2.8 million.
- Two weeks after that verdict, another jury this time found Adobe violated several Macromedia patents and awarded Macromedia $4.9 million. The then chairman and CEO of Macromedia Rob Burgess: “The score is now Adobe one, Macromedia one, customers zero.”
- In 2005, Adobe bought Macromedia in a $3.4 billion stock deal.
- In 2010, after Apple blocked Flash from the App store and Steve Jobs shared his “Thoughts on Flash” publicly, an Adobe platform evangelist blogged “Go screw yourself Apple” and Adobe is said to have asked for governmental intervention.
