Let’s be positive

Every story I read about Google is us versus some other company or some stupid thing. Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero sum.

Except Microsoft is not playing ball

The Web is not advancing as fast as it should be. Certainly, we struggle with companies like Microsoft. We would like to see more open standards and more people involved in those ecosystems. I wouldn’t grade the industry well with where we have gotten to.

And that other Larry is just greedy

We’ve had a difficult relationship with Oracle, including having to appear in court. Money is obviously more important to them than any collaboration.”

Google has been fighting with Microsoft for a while and well, Oracle is a tough adversary, especially when it comes to Java.

While I am complete agreement with Page’s general sentiment about opportunities and the importance of being positive, I think Larry (and all other technology industry leaders) should actually practice what they preach if they want others to follow.

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“It’s easy to make big money when you get to keep all the profits,” the Glass Balcony post points out, before complaining about the impact of these low-outlay ways on real people:

“Relying on automated support systems is no longer adequate. As the amount of online fraud grows over the years, automated systems are becoming less efficient. There is no accurate measure for that, however it’s anecdotally known that it’s more common nowadays for Google to shut down perfectly well-standing and long-standing AdSense accounts for invalid activity without providing the actual reasons for shutdown. Ditto for PayPal withholding the funds of customers.”

We all marvel at how quickly these companies grow and at their bounteous financials, but we don’t often enough sit back and consider why it is these companies can perform so well.

A huge part of that is down to enabling technologies, from the web itself to cloud computing and, yes, natural language processing and other technologies that will make automated customer service more useful and reliable. But that’s only part of the picture.

At this stage in the game, these companies are playing by different rules to everyone else. In the context of the post I mentioned above, customers are not customers: instead, they are users. If the exchange of money isn’t central to the relationship, as it is with an e-commerce operation such as Amazon, then customer support becomes an afterthought – after all, most of the users aren’t paying with anything more than their personal data anyway, so what should they expect?

But that’s only one facet. Pull back, and this iconoclasm becomes even more concerning.

Taxing times

I’m not suggesting that Amazon, Google and Facebook are breaking any laws, but they certainly don’t pay much tax either, relative to their revenues. In Europe, this is becoming a big issue, which is unsurprising given our current age of austerity. After all, if small businesses are struggling in this economic and technological environment, is it really fair that the megacorps taking their business away (particularly in retail) are so big and international that they don’t have to play by the same rules?

Bear in mind that Amazon is supposedly operating at a loss. The company’s margins are so low that it can destroy most competition, yet it somehow continues to expand. If the company paid taxes at the rate that small businesses need to, this situation would be entirely unsustainable.

The economic benefits for anyone other than Amazon are sometimes hard to see. Small businesses that would have paid their taxes in full are going under, and those public revenues are not being replaced. Of course these web giants are based somewhere – usually the U.S. – but their money often goes through a dizzying series of countries before it finds some tax haven where it can rest quietly. And from the companies’ perspective, why not? They operate everywhere; they can pick and choose.

That can sometimes lead to a sense that the web giants don’t feel beholden to any particular society. Consider these extraordinary quotes from Larry Page at yesterday’s Google I/O Q&A session:

“The pace of change in the world is increasing… We haven’t adapted mechanisms to deal with that. Maybe some of our old institutions like the law and so on aren’t keeping up with the rate of change that we’ve caused through technology. The laws when we went public were 50 years old. The law can’t be right if it’s 50 years old, that’s before the internet…

“We also haven’t built mechanisms to allow experimentation. There’s many exciting things you can do that you just can’t do because they’re illegal or against regulation. That makes sense, we don’t want our world to change too fast, but maybe we should set aside a small part of the world. I like going to Burning Man, for example, that’s an environment where people can try different things.”

Some have mocked Page for “wanting to start his own country”, but that risks missing Page’s point. He just sees Google as a special case that should enjoy at least limited exemptions from the rules that apply to smaller, pre-internet-style concerns. “If your rules weren’t written for us,” he seemed to say, “they shouldn’t apply to us.”

Competition

I sympathize with this view to a very limited extent: the pace of technological change does mean that regulators and legislators need to speed up their own operations if they want to keep up. Where Page and I part company, though, is that he wants Google to be hassled less and I want to see, for example, new data privacy laws that put meaningful and practical limitations on what companies such as his can do.

The great benefits of the free market system are supposed to be its enabling of genuine, merit-based competition and the resulting benefits to society. What we’re seeing here is a reduction in competition and variety, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few giants, and the rise of players so big as to feel untouchable. The lack of genuine customer service mentioned at the start of this article is both symptomatic of this situation and one of its many drivers.

That sense of invulnerability and entitlement will affect us all, not only in terms of public finances, but in other fields too, such as data protection. These companies are worth more than many countries, and you can tell they know it.

In short, I’m worried about where this industry is going. I’m all for progress – I’d have chosen a strange field of journalism if that wasn’t the case – but perhaps it’s time to aim for a wider evaluation of what’s going on here. It’s not about being positive or negative. It’s about making sure that the massive societal changes this industry is effecting work out for the benefit of society as a whole.

After all, that’s why many of us are in this game to start with.

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But this morning when I was walking through downtown San Francisco before Google’s I/O conference, I was crossing a street when I saw a particularly pretty scene of the sun rising between two buildings. Hoping I’d have enough time before the walk signal ended, I dug my iPhone out of my bag, swiped to open the camera, snapped a photo, and then jogged to the curb to avoid getting hit by cars. (Mom, I hope you’re not reading this.)

So a few hours later, when I tried on Google Glass for the first time and said the command “take photo,” instantly capturing a photo of my colleague Kevin Tofel standing in front of me without moving either my head or my hands, I started to see the appeal of Glass.

I’d read a decent amount about the technology since Sergey Brin dropped from a helicopter at last year’s Google I/O, and not only was I sort of confused by the specifics of how Glass works (A camera on your face? Facebook on top of everyday life? How do people see when they’re wearing them?), I was turned off by the severely dorky appearance and the idea of constantly monitoring the things around you. They seemed vaguely creepy and intrusive. I was not attracted to the idea of wearing them as a normal person walking around town.

But even though I only got a short spin with the technology on Wednesday, it only took a few seconds for me to understand why people are so jazzed about Glass.

I put them on my face and was immediately impressed with how lightweight they felt. Despite their futuristic, clunkly-on-one-side appearance, they didn’t feel very bulky or heavy on my face, and it was easy to see the room around me while wearing them. (Even though they weren’t fitted specifically for my face the way they would be if I purchased them.) The screen felt much smaller and unobtrusive than I’d imagined, and it wasn’t hard to swipe the side of the glasses to navigate the screen. But it was the voice commands, and the “take photo” command, that changed my perspective on the technology.

Would I spend $1,500 on them right now? Definitely not. If you need prescription glasses of any kind, it would be hard to combine those with Glass. While Google has launched them in some jazzy new colors, you still look absurd wearing them (whether you’re in the shower or not). This probably makes me somewhat vain, but I’d want them to look cooler and less futuristic before I wore them in everyday life (seriously, embed them in some Warby Parker frames, and I’d be way more down with the idea.)

And once apps start streaming into the glasses, I can’t imagine how seeing New York Times headlines and tweets wouldn’t be distracting while you’re doing things like walking or driving. Of course, none of this even gets into the new etiquette that would have to arise from the spread of Glass.

But despite all the drawbacks, speaking the words for the “take photo” command made me realize that even if wearable computing has a pretty dorky image right now, the potential practical applications for real-life people who don’t consider themselves nerds are endless — once the technology gets a little more refined, and we figure out how to use them in public.

I talked to one Google employee who said she sat in her sister’s graduation and streamed video through Glass to family members from afar, and another who said she uses it to take photos of her little kids when her hands are full. I would imagine it could be huge for people with disabilities, or people doing outdoor sports (Kevin mentioned you could take photos of mile markers while running a marathon.)

“Every time we’ve tried to do something crazy we’ve made progress,” Larry Page said on stage today. So does Google Glass seem a little nuts right now? Sure. But if a few years from now I can snap a photo of a sunrise without having a near-miss with traffic, I’m open to the possibilities.

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Before Google’s senior vice president, Vic Gundotra announced the new Google+ Wednesday at Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, I sat down with Fred Gilbert who heads up design for Google+, who explained how the company arrived at this new, improved look; I see it as a hybrid of a stream and Pinterest-style cards that doesn’t look awkward and ungainly.

It is a responsive design and with a click you switch how you want to see your content — as a stream or as these tiles, Gilbert pointed out. A lot of the new design actually takes a lot of cues from the current mobile versions of Google+, which are actually more advanced compared to the desktop version. At first blush this looks like a unification of mobile and desktop, but there are changes that are visible only on Google’s Chrome browser.

Fred Gilbert, lead designer for the new Google+

Gilbert, who has worked for Google for over five years, explained that a lot of the new design has been shaped by how the web has changed. He pointed out that we are sharing more things more often and as a result the social web is getting busier. You can say that again!

“What I saw was a chance to make people and the content they share the star,” Gilbert said. “Everything else just fades into the background.”

Flat design for a busy world

The design of the new Google+ is muted and flat. The colors are actually quite neutral, allowing mostly the content to shine brighter. “Flatter design keeps the distraction away,” Gilbert said. This new philosophy is reflected in this new version of Google+, which is marked by simplicity and fewer distractions. For instance, unless you are ready to engage with a piece of content, the links appear as regular text, without the distraction of the blue link. Both the left and right sidebar and menus disappear, sliding in and out as needed.

Google has come up with a unique twist on the #hashtag concept and is using it as a way to surface contextual information on the new Google+ service. The new design also liberally uses the concept of cards (that first showed up on Google Now). Hover over an item, and on the back side of the card you get more information and related links and action items.

Gilbert explained that when Google started working on the new look, the idea was to take a lot of information and show it in as simple a manner, giving the eye the visual cues to understand the importance of content. Bigger photos, for instance are indicative of their importance. Photos become bigger based on analysis of past relationships to the people and the content and their ensuing interactions, Gilbert explained.

Data, Design, Experience

Underlying these visual cues are a lot of data analytics. This data-informed design is actually a clever approach and the wave of the data-informed design. Gilbert said that usually when companies undertake a redesign of their website, it is based on some kind of data they have collected over a period of time. For Google+, data is informing the design, except at a much faster speed and is hyper-personalized based on who you really are. “Data and design have to be used together to tailor experiences,” said Gilbert.

We’ll take a close look at how data is informing design at our RoadMap event in November in San Francisco. If you sign up here you can get first access to tickets that will go on sale this Summer.

While Google still is a few years away from developing the human quotient of Apple, the new Google+ shows that the company is thinking correctly about its design identity, not forgetting that its core competency is its infrastructure: its ability to crunch large sets of data cheaply and quickly and then deliver them at blazing speed to our browsers.

The biggest challenge for Google is that Google+ doesn’t really feel like a social network like Facebook or Twitter. Instead it is something that was launched because of a degree of fear and a dash of hubris. It was a social network that Larry wanted, not you and I.

However, it has slowly evolved and has found some fanatical users such as photographer Trey Ratcliff, blogger Robert Scoble and our very own Janko Roettgers, who has turned to Google+ to build a community for his Cord Cutters show and podcasts. Google needs accidental visitors such as me to become active participants. I think the new design will help.

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AllThingsD said the change of plan was included in a memo that also announced the departure of Google Wallet head Osama Bedier. The report cited sources who said that “Google CEO Larry Page abruptly killed the card launch plan after he was displeased with a glitchy run-through last week. He had long been skeptical of a physical card solution, with several sources saying he felt it did not press forward innovation as payments startups like Square have done.”

Google Wallet has also been hampered by its lack of partnerships with mobile carriers and platforms. It is available through Sprint, Virgin Mobile and some other carriers on select Samsung and LG phones but is not supported by Verizon, AT&T or T-Mobile, and does not work on the iPhone.

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Facebook’s news feed design was the big news of the week. Here is what we think about the new colorful icons and sorting of the feed into categories like events and music. By the way, why couldn’t they couldn’t come up with a better analogy than a newspaper?

Talking about Facebook, one has to wonder what raw nerve Nick Bilton’s piece hit that the social web giant had to come back with all its PR guns blazing. Bilton pointed out that the engagement on his posts had gone down drastically but when he paid to promote those same links, it shot up. We have a sneaking suspicion that we have not heard the last of this debate, but if you want to get a good handle on the situation, try reading this analysis by Nick O’Neill.

Mark Zuckerberg responds to press questions and photos after announcing the new Facebook News Feed redesign on March 7 in Menlo Park.

Billionaire Boys Club: Facebook and Google have one thing in common: the co-founders of both companies are among the richest people in the world. Not much of a surprise. As technology becomes a part of our everyday lives, it’s also no surprise that tech leaders dominated the top of the annual Forbes Billionaires list this year.

Though they were dubbed “underperformers” by Forbes (technology-based billionaires on the list saw their net worth rise by only 8%, while the entire list combined rose 15%), it’s hard to find fault in a collective fortune of $272.6 billion. But in a time of massive income inequality – 80% of Americans believe their children will be worse off than they are — are these lists still relevant?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google were ranked at number four and five, respectively, while Mark Zuckerberg dropped to the ninth top earner (from sixth in 2012) with $13.3 billion in his coffers. That’s a lot of 747s and James Perse hoodies.

Fortune doesn’t favor the print: Print may be on the decline, but will it die a slow death? Time Warner decided to spin off its magazine publishing arm this week instead of trying to pass off the job to Meredith Corporation, creating a new standalone company for its top mags. This further perpetuates the belief that the broken print model will be ushered into the retirement home sooner rather than later as the web produces endless amounts of content, and technology makes consuming it easier than ever.

But print does have its fans — Warren Buffett invested $344 million in newspapers last year. Does he know something we don’t? We are worried about Fortune, the magazine, for we do think they have some great pieces.

VC vs VC: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venerable venture capital firm that had funded companies such as Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Genentech, Compaq, Amazon and Google, had a pretty forgettable decade. They apologized to their backers. VC Georges van Hoegaerden, writing for industry publication PE Hub, argues that the issues plaguing them and many haloed investing names are much deeper. Our colleague Katie Fehrenbacher writes a thoughtful piece on perils of righteous investing. By the way, have you read that piece about Ellen Pao and her hubby in Vanity Fair?

Mobile-palooza: You have to be really brave to pack your bags and go to Barcelona and attend Mobile World Congress. Our team members David Meyer and Kevin Fitchard did just that and both fell sick after getting back. Chetan Sharma was lucky, and that gave him a chance to recap the mobilepalooza — it is worth reading.

Freedom to Roam: If you’re dreading spending the rest of your mobile life (or at least the next 24 months) tied to one carrier, there’s good news: The White House has your back when it comes to unlocking your phone. A petition that raised over 100,000 signatures in a month has the support of the White House and a number of state senators, one of which has already drafted the Wireless Device Independence Act of 2013, which promises to legally free your devices from carrier restriction. But will it really change anything? Andrew Couts unlocks the truth.

Taking a Bow: Pop music is filled with flash-in-the-pan tunes, but the classics never fade. Unless you’re the CEO of Pandora, Joe Kennedy, who announced this week that he needed a “recharge” after his long 10-year tenure, and will be stepping aside as soon as a replacement can be found. Does this open the door for other up-and-coming music services to make their move?

As it so happens, Apple is said to be seeking a harmonious collaboration with the “Daisy Project,” backed by Beats Electronics, while  Google has partnered with Warner Music for a Google Play subscription service and is setting the stage a YouTube-Spotify throwdown. It will be interesting to see how these companies build and structure their streaming services, especially since this will be yet another effort by Apple to get music right after Ping failed to take off.

Mapping Your Innards: Google has enabled us to visit distant locations, thanks to Street View, and gets us from A to B without much difficulty. But a team of researchers has been able to one-up those achievements by successfully mapping the human metabolism. Why should you care? Well, in the future, we might actually be able to predict how our fragile bodies will react to disease, drugs and foods, which can help make the painful experience of allergy testing and trial-by-elimination a thing of the past.

Here are some stories we recommend for this weekend.

• Let’s save great ideas from the ideas industry, argues Umair Haque, over on Harvard Business Review website. His column is an argument against conferences such as the recently concluded TED.
• The printed travel guidebook is dead. Put a fork in it, says Skift’s Jason Clampet.
• The WatchMen: There’s a high tech team inside the Milwaukee PD trained to monitor the city and fight crime before it happens. This is their story.
• A LEED-certified city built on algorithms? It’s happening in South Korea, and it might give us a little glimpse of what future cities can (should?) look like.
• If you think Google Glass is futuristic, check out the computerized eyewear Steve Mann has been working on for the past decade.
• Upgrade or die, says George Packer in the New Yorker. He argues “that obsessive upgrading and chronic stagnation are intimately related, in the same way that erotic fantasies are related to sexual repression.”
• What sex can teach us about energy efficiency? Great headline, better article.

Read this and other in-depth articles on GigaOM’s Flipboard channel

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For our newest ebook, The Battle for the Books: Inside Google’s Gambit to Create the World’s Biggest Library, GigaOM’s Jeff John Roberts describes the technological and legal twists and turns of the story through the people affected by it: the authors who feared losing rights to their work, publishers facing lost revenue, technologists pushing for a world where all written knowledge is digital, and librarians who believe in open access to information. 

As the fight brewed over who owned the rights to the books Google was busily digitizing, one question in particular came to mind: Why was Google doing this? In this excerpt, Roberts travels to the Stanford University campus to find an answer. Buy the book today on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

By definition, there is no market for millions of forgotten, out-of-print books; their contents offer endless opportunities for personal enrichment, but no equivalent financial richness. Scanning the world’s books presented, at best, a negligible business opportunity along with some very foreseeable legal headaches. So why did Google bother?

A good source on why Google does what it does is Stanford professor Terry Winograd, who supervised Larry Page’s doctoral studies and worked with both Google founders on the school’s Digital Library Project. Inside Winograd’s office in Stanford’s computer science building, shelves groaned with books, which, according to Winograd, are a technological obsolescence for others in the department.

Winograd is a quiet, mustached man with fluffy hair and a kind demeanor who is renowned for his pioneering work in artificial intelligence. There was little romantic in Winograd’s description of the genesis of the audacious book-scanning plan. He portrayed a project born equally of scholarly idealism and a cold, futuristic determinism. “It’s an idea Larry and Sergey had from the very beginning. It’s an idea that there’s knowledge out there,” he recalled. “It’s the intellectual, technological imperative.” Winograd would later repeat this phrase several times when describing how the Google founders see the world.

Multiple sources directly involved in the project confirmed that the push to scan the world’s books was not just one of the myriad eccentric projects (from driverless cars to a Mars map website) that constantly spring up all over Google. The book project was special.

“It came straight from Larry and Sergey,” said an author who took part in the negotiations between Google and the Authors Guild. “This is a project top management stayed close to and made clear that they wanted it done.”

While the Google founders’ determination to scan books is apparent, the personal motives of Brin and Page were less clear. Critics have pointed to the book scheme as proof the founders are greedy or power-hungry. New Yorker writer Ken Auletta and author of the book Googled, for instance, suggested the book scanning was simply pathological. In a 2010 phone interview, he explained to me, “They were just thinking as engineers do — Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do that? They’re not businessmen. They’re cold engineers.”

Others have been harsher, suggesting that the Google founders’ decision to scan books without permission amounts to a type of technological barbarism rooted in a lack of culture or literary savoir faire.

Such caricatures are neither fair nor accurate. Winograd dismissed them by pointing out that both Page and Brin were raised in academic families that valued books and libraries.

As for Page and Brin themselves, they don’t seem to have cared whether the world thought they were visionaries or villains. They had a task to accomplish. As Winograd said, “I think if you ask them, [they’d say] this is going to get done, even in five years. This is the technological imperative — information must be searchable. They’re often more in tune to the technological imperative than to social barriers. To them, social barriers are transient.”

The authors and publishers who eventually sued Google over the book scanning would likely chafe at the notion that they are “transient social barriers,” but the Google founders’ attitude was not altogether unreasonable. A new technology had made it possible to create a vast library of the world’s books, so what was everyone waiting for?

With this mix of insouciance and technological urgency, Brin and Page began to put their grand plan into place.

Buy The Battle for the Books ebook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or iTunes. For more information on this and other GigaOM Books, go to pro.gigaom.com/books.

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On an afternoon earnings call, Google announced it had a run rate of $8 billion from its mobile business, consisting of revenue from ads, apps and content.

CEO Larry Page, still hoarse from a voice problem that silenced him for months, stated that the vast majority of that mobile revenue came from ads and that mobile is a “significant portion” compared to desktop ads. He declined, however, to provide specific figures or to disclose the margins Google is making on apps and content in the Play store.

The CEO likewise deflected a question about whether desktop ad revenue had “flat-lined,” and declined to say whether it was a matter of quarters or years before mobile revenue caught up. He did, however, say that for now few people were using Google Chrome browser on their mobile device — implying that future broader adoption will trigger a new rush of ad revenue and e-commerce.

What all this means is that those trying to read Google’s mobile tea leaves will have to wait to learn whether the company really has adapted its search money machine for the smartphone era. The $8 billion figure could thus either represent more big time growth at Google or, alternately, the start of stagnation.

The call came after a disastrous morning in which Google spooked the market by mistakenly releasing its earnings four hours early and, worse, posting horrid results. Trading in the company’s shares was briefly halted and the shares ultimately lost $60, finishing the day down eight percent.

Page and the executives, however, remained relentlessly upbeat on the call, pointing to four macro-trends they claim will benefit Google: 1) the rise of the “multi-screen consumer” which will allow marketers to reach them closer to points of purchase; 2) the ability to deliver more precise shopping information to consumers; 3) Google’s ability to sell advertising across a growing number of “technology stacks,” including YouTube and Google+; 4) the company’s growing traction in cloud computing and enterprise products.

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Lower-level representatives of the company have apparently been in “ongoing” talks, but Page and Cook spoke last week via telephone and plan to talk again “in the coming weeks.”

But talking isn’t action. It’s great that they have each other’s phone numbers. But what could these talks actually mean for the bad blood between the companies, the claims of “theft” and the recent lawsuit filed by Google-owned Motorola against Apple? Here’s what Reuters’ source is saying:

One possible scenario under consideration could be a truce involving disputes over basic features and functions in Google’s Android mobile software, one source said. But it’s unclear whether Page and Cook are discussing a broad settlement of the various disputes between the two companies – most of which involve the burgeoning mobile computing area – or are focused on a more limited set of issues.

The impetus for these talks was reportedly Apple’s landmark victory in its Samsung patent case reached by a California jury last Friday. And it’s obvious why: Apple hasn’t sued Google directly for infringing on iOS design and utility patents with Android, but a jury found very easily that Google’s most important and most successful Android customer, Samsung, did.

Still, the possible effects of the verdict reach much further than Samsung. On Monday morning a lot of post-trial analysis focused on what Apple’s victory over Samsung meant for Google, and for good reason: Google’s Android was a huge factor in allowing smartphone and mobile device makers to easily imitate the iPhone, and eventually the iPad, with inexpensive, ready-made mobile software.

Apple has responded to the invention and subsequent proliferation of Android not just by vowing to destroy Android, but by taking steps to avoid reliance on any Google products or software in iOS. In addition to building its own Maps app in place of default Google Maps, Apple is also planning to drop the YouTube app from iOS. It’ll be interesting to see if any resolution between the two companies reverses any of Apple’s decisions on these fronts.

Then again, Cook also “talked” with Samsung’s CEO before and during the recently concluded trial — and we know how much good that did.

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