Showing all posts tagged google

In In Focus

How to Break Up Google

Author Jesse SteelePosted on

News Corp has called for Google to break up. Good call. Here’s one way to break up Google:

  1. Make Gmail an installable web app and allow full export of email, calendar, and contacts, using self-hosting and allowing the @gmail.com address to continue on self-hosted, “federated” cloud.
  2. Sell Google Ads entirely and to two separate companies, allowing both new owners to pay Google for user/meta information on a royalty/subscription -like basis.
  3. Split off YouTube into its own, separate entity, but allow continued optional integration with the same Google services—or with other services such at Yahoo.

This would be an opportunity for Yahoo to make a comeback. We do need balance in the market and no monopoly is good.

Will it happen? Probably not. Google’s belligerence has probably destined it to become a utility. But, it sure was a nice dream while it lasted.

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In Blog

Google Headed Down

Author Jesse SteelePosted on 1 Comment

I don’t say it lightly. They’ve pioneered a lot with online search and their Gmail has proven to the world that the market likes “labels” instead of “folders”… not sure why no other email engines have figured that out. Perhaps it’s related to the fact that software is often written by programmers—who tend to think in terms of “exclusive categories” and Norton Commander/DOS file-system directories, forgetting that conversations affect more than one topic at a time.

But… back to Google…

How did they become famous? Why did we like them? What made them different?

AOL earned itself an early reputation for being the first and only company that found a way to spam our snail mail boxes with software. We “marked” them accordingly.

Yahoo! …it’s in the name itself: excitement. But, excitement about what? I mean, if your brand get’s people’s adrenaline going, they’ll quickly leave unless there’s a good reason.  · · · →