{"id":11,"date":"2006-02-14T23:01:14","date_gmt":"2006-02-15T06:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/wp\/?p=11"},"modified":"2006-02-14T23:01:14","modified_gmt":"2006-02-15T06:01:14","slug":"i-love-google-or-google-bashing-we-love-to-hate-what-we-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/2006\/02\/14\/i-love-google-or-google-bashing-we-love-to-hate-what-we-love\/","title":{"rendered":"I Love Google, or, Google Bashing: We Love to Hate What We Love"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Our man in London had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/archives\/001286.html\">quite a bit to say about Mr. $343.32 A Share<\/a> earlier today.<\/p>\n<h2>Side Note: &#8220;Today&#8221;<\/h2>\n<p>The notion of &#8220;today&#8221; starts to loose meaning when your work is spread across time zones. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/sogrady\/\">Steve<\/a> is in Denver, at -7 (or whatever Mountain Time is: I&#8217;ve never figured out that kooky time zone); I&#8217;m in Austin at -6; and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.monkchips.com\">James<\/a> is right on the zero, making his calculations super easy&#8230;lucky bastard. So, when is today? What time zone does &#8220;today&#8221; occur in?<\/p>\n<p>All you <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0374292884\"><i>The World is Flat<\/i><\/a> types get ready: the word &#8220;today&#8221; will loose meaning, as will your family life if you don&#8217;t watch out.<\/p>\n<h2>Back to Google<\/h2>\n<p>Many of the comments to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/archives\/001286.html\">the original post<\/a> raise good points, namely, &#8220;yeah, but Google rocks!&#8221; (which <i>is<\/i> a good point as <a href=\"http:\/\/headrush.typepad.com\/\">many smart people will tell you<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>My feel on Google-mania is:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>$343.32 a share? Really? Even including Google Earth, I&#8217;m like, &#8220;wha?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Google&#8217;s real narrative&#8221; is &#8220;throw it on the web and see what sticks.&#8221; They&#8217;re the prime example of an Agile company&#8230;without every yelling out to the market that they&#8217;re Agile.<\/li>\n<li>If they can either (a.) move their &#8220;ship early, ship often&#8221; magic to the desktop, or, (b.) move the millions of desktop users to the web, they&#8217;ll have a huge chunk of eye-balls locked in.<\/li>\n<li>At this point, eye-balls and clicks are all that matter. Aside from the enterprise division (whose products <a href=\"http:\/\/www.drunkandretired.com\/2005\/06\/08\/more-google-enterprise-apps-on-the-way-search-behind-the-firewall\/\">I&#8217;m a <i>huge<\/i> fan of<\/a>&#8230;I wish they&#8217;d expand out to more behind-the-firewall appliances), their money maker is &#8220;Small Ads, Big Profits&#8221;&#8230;any one remember <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=%22Don+Lapre%22\">the last dude who tried that out<\/a>?<\/li>\n<li>Google figured how to make sustainable revenue off the web before the incumbents did, and <a href=\"http:\/\/scobleizer.wordpress.com\/2006\/02\/11\/google-domains-going-after-outlook-msn-did-that-months-ago\/\">said incumbents are hating the consequences of that huge miss now<\/a>. So it goes. That&#8217;s the American, capitalist version of innovation, my friends: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0089530\/maindetails\">two men enter, one man leaves<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Damn, I sure do love Google and it&#8217;s software. I&#8217;m smelling what everyone else is steppin&#8217; in.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Love Isn&#8217;t Free<\/h2>\n<p>I&#8217;ve heard that money can&#8217;t but you love, but it&#8217;s just not true when it comes to commerce: how the money changes hands just gets more complicated. I love Google&#8217;s products, and they&#8217;ve spent plenty for everyone&#8217;s love: in R&#038;D, text ad sales, and selling off a huge chunk of the company with their IPO. Aside from FireFox and OS X, I must use Google apps more than any other software I &#8220;have&#8221; (an odd notion with SaaS). (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.feedlounge.com\/\">FeedLounge<\/a> is a close contender, but they&#8217;ll have to speed up to make it possible to get more of my time.) I&#8217;m in GMail constantly, and not an hour goes by when I&#8217;m not searching in Google for something or using it as the quickest and most accurate spellcheck ever known to humanity.<\/p>\n<p>This has gotten me to think recently: how much would I pay to keep my love affair with Google&#8217;s services when\/if the text ad market stops supporting my habit? My fear is that the price would be too high for me or anyone. That is: Google may be offering gold at the price of tin, subsidized by ads. I&#8217;m no numbers\/money man, but that&#8217;s certainly all I can conclude from their stock price.<\/p>\n<h2>Tenuous Tulips<\/h2>\n<p>In the back of all of our heads, we&#8217;re mindful that the first internet bubble was fueled by the delusional belief that ads could pay for all this &#8220;revolution,&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wired\/archive\/1.01\/\">as we liked to fancy it back then<\/a>. Once the emperor paraded down the streets (along with a few other unfortunate events like <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/business\/1809266.stm\">Enron<\/a> and the rise of America&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/news\/releases\/2001\/09\/20010917-3.html\">&#8220;Dead or Alive&#8221; view of the world<\/a>) that business model shriveled up. Thus, we&#8217;re all a little nervous about Google who seems to be following the same model, just with text instead of GIFs.<\/p>\n<p>Sure, I&#8217;d like to believe that if you just get enough smart people together and enough cash-money, wonderful things like Google Search and GMail can live on forever, for free. But in a mind-set like mine, whose tunnels and links are clogged up with <a href=\"http:\/\/drunkandretired.com\/fx\/\">worthless stock options<\/a> like <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bill_Swerski's_Superfans\">too much pork-fat<\/a> in arteries, I start looking for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.straightdope.com\/columns\/040430.html\">nitroglycerin pills<\/a> when it&#8217;s all based on ads. How long can I go on eating hot-dogs and candy for free before I need to get out my wallet and pay up?<\/p>\n<p>(Which raises an interesting point: how does <a href=\"http:\/\/www.drunkandretired.com\/2005\/11\/11\/ray-ozzies-the-internet-services-disruption-memo\/\">Ray Ozzie&#8217;s plan for Microsoft<\/a> pan out then?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our man in London had quite a bit to say about Mr. $343.32 A Share earlier today. Side Note: &#8220;Today&#8221; The notion of &#8220;today&#8221; starts to loose meaning when your work is spread across time zones. Steve is in Denver, at -7 (or whatever Mountain Time is: I&#8217;ve never figured out that kooky time zone); [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-companies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}