Tag Archive for 'unreasonablemen.net'

Chrome rounds out Google’s platform plays

Published by The Unreasonablemen on September 9, 2008 in Business. 0 Comments

A guest post from the unreasonablemen.net

A year or so ago I went to a Salesforce.com event in which they trotted out a Google Apps exec to support their no software message.  The guy (I forget his name) was delayed coming into Sydney and so was pretty jet lagged. His only piece of take home message   “ we’re [at Google] a big believer in the no software message”

Kinda interesting considering you have to download and install the Chrome software (as an aside is the browser morphing to legendary status, the same but different from ‘software’). This aside, the point was this. Cloud delivered applications require a robust internet connection and a browser.  

This dependency on the browser and its ability to arbitrage Google has meant they’ve had to act and build something. This to me is the same play as Android, something I wrote about a wee while ago. It has nothing to do with the browser, but everything to do with the internet services that Google wants to deliver or protect. Search, advertising and apps.

Android is about giving Google a play mobile where they have no current advertising stream. Chrome is about a applications platform (and i suspect) a tool to get more information about web habits (which will enhance the advertising business).  Google needs this because the ability for adds to be blocked in a browser by a plugin (see Nick Carr’s two pieces on Adblock) or by an ISP are trivial.  This represents a very real threat to Google’s lifeblood… and to their credit they’ve innovated.

Microsoft is trying to but is clearly struggling… the browser as the OS of the future isn’t a picture that they particularly want. For that reason I believe they should get the hell outta the consumer market and focus on business. (more on this in a latter post).  Microsoft are also failing in the mobile space. This piece by Tim O’Reilly really sums up the mess they’ve gotten themselves into. It also supports my hypothesis, Google’s building platforms that they are hoping will be web on-ramps.  How successful they are in doing this will be interesting, given the issues they’ve had with robustness before.  I actually don’t think they care if Chrome dominants or not, I believe that as long as there are others who jump on their path and deliver the same outcome…. Ads served up, easy and reliable access to applications they will be happy

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I won’t be using Chrome.

Published by The Unreasonablemen on September 5, 2008 in Business. 3 Comments

A guest post from the unreasonablemen.net

A couple of reasons. Firstly unlike Firefox and Safari and of course the corporate supported IE, it doesn’t seem to get past the companies proxy server.  Second, and most importantly to me I’m not prepared to give Google any more information about myself.

 Don’t get my wrong, I’m a happy user of 3 Google services - mail, reader and analytics . But that’s about all i want Google to know about me. Read Write Web has a good history and synopsis of Google’s privacy  stance. To me, reading that I get uneasy… real uneasy.  Ben Kepes and I have debated this before, I can summarise his position as more trusting than mine. Simple as that.

 I know that Google has a stated position of “do no evil”. I also know what happens in companies when they get squeeze for revenue and profit. Not always the right things.  Reason number 1.

 Another way to think about this. Google is a company of nearly 20 000 people, they’re like a small city in terms of population. And even small cities have bad people.  In the US 1 in every 136 people have been caught and convicted of a crime, if you extrapolate that out it means you would expect a company the size of Google to have 147 bad people.  147 people who could mis-use all that data that they now have the potential to access.

 End of the day its your choice, but you should be aware of the privacy issues associated with cloud services.

  

PS I’ve dropped Firefox and moved to Safari as my browser of choice. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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People, you’ve only got yourselves to blame.

Published by The Unreasonablemen on July 8, 2008 in Business. 11 Comments

A guest post from the unreasonablemen.net

Vodafone NZ’s iPhone pricing has become so topical we even made some US news wires…well done but I’m sorry you only have yourselves to blame…

I told a couple of you repeatedly that it is just a phone. And you kept giving me the bull that its “cool” and revolutionary”… this is just the magic of Steve Jobs and Apple. They got you to be their own marketing machine, and in doing so you made the thing (just a phone) a prestige item and a prestige brand….

Just in the same way Tag Heuer is in watches, Bang and Olufsen in stereos Aston Martin is in cars. You pay over the top for those items because of the brand prestige, why is the iPhone different? Oh that’s right, it was you that created the brand prestige.

Is the pricing over the top? Certainly, but given the monopoly position Vodafone has on the aforementioned prestige item, namely the iPhone product, what else did you expect people?

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Can Google go Enterprise?

Published by The Unreasonablemen on July 2, 2008 in SaaS. 2 Comments

A guest post from the unreasonablemen.net

There’s a growing opinion that the answer to that is no. Om Malik got stuck into Gmail last week.

How is one supposed to run a business on such an unreliable platform? The integration of Google’s services remains a distant dream, reminding us of the limitation of its competence beyond search and advertising.

Today Phil Wainewright posted about Sergey Solyanik, [a?] development manager at Google who has gone back to Microsoft because “he values reliability far, far more than coolness”.

Sergey’s point according to Phil is that Google’s emphasis

[is] on building Web properties that are popular, but which primarily help people waste time online

It’s interesting how we pidgin hole companies. Google is a technology company for sure, but they are a technology company that does online advertising really well. Is it reasonable for us to expect them to be able to deliver on-demand business grade services?

I rather suspect that for Google to deliver other (any?) applications is a stretch because of the same barriers that all entrenched, incumbents face. Culture, resources, big revenue levers getting attention etc., etc.

The evidence seems to be growing that Google is lacking something when it comes to building business grade, on demand services.

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