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5 Reasons to Hate Google - Interesting Article

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zridling:
It's a good thing that Google and Eric "true anonymity is too dangerous" Schmidt parted ways. You can pick up the discussion here:
http://wn.com/eric_schmidt_at_technology

Maybe Larry Page can do what almost no one else has done: keep Google from the ossification that can paralyze large corporations, when they get too big that one part is working against another.

JavaJones:
It's a good thing that Google and Eric "true anonymity is too dangerous" Schmidt parted ways. You can pick up the discussion here:
http://wn.com/eric_schmidt_at_technology

Maybe Larry Page can do what almost no one else has done: keep Google from the ossification that can paralyze large corporations, when they get to big that one part is working against another.
-zridling (April 13, 2011, 01:34 PM)
--- End quote ---

I sure hope so, but I'm not going to count on it. It may also be too late, perhaps something that one needed to avoid in the first place...

- Oshyan

IainB:
My 10 cents, for what it's worth.
Google is indeed a 12-year old corporate upstart, as Sean X Cummings suggests in his article 5 reasons to hate Google.
It is generally true that history repeats and that those of us who have no knowledge or awareness of the pertinent history will be doomed to act in the repetition.
I would bet that Google management will understand this concept very well.

Empires rise and fall. Commercial IT empires do likewise.
In the early '80s, US anti-trust legislation forced IBM to break its monopoly position and sell off its IBM (Bureau) Services arm. IBM (Bureau) Services was bought by a rising star, the giant CDC (Control Data Corporation), headed by William Norris. CDC was estimated as being the third largest computer company at the time (IBM was 1st., Olivetti was 2nd.). The then IT giants Olivetti, Honeywell, Univac, NCR, Westinghouse et al have either all fallen by the wayside or disappeared altogether.

Though CDC was a giant corporation, whose core business was a series of powerful mainframes and supercomputers (the Cyber range) it had quite rapidly evaporated by the mid-'80s. Hardly anyone remembers it today. It evaporated having exhausted itself financially by diversifying into too many superb products and services (PLATO anyone?) at once and by funding too many HUGE philanthropic projects for the betterment of world populations. It had meanwhile lost sight of its core business and profitability and had failed to see the need to re-engineer/reinvent itself in the changing market. One of the chief designers of CDC - Seymour Cray - went off to found the Cray supercomputer manufacturing company.

Similarly, the huge GM offshoot - EDS - which had seen the need to reinvent itself in the '90s, failed to achieve that end, and started to collapse and was bought out by HP in 2008. HP stripped EDS of its assets and its people and made it into its services arm. HP itself is the result of having gobbled up Compaq Corp. in 2002 and other, smaller companies. Compaq was the result of gobbling up Digital Corp. and Tandem Corp. and smaller companies, etc. How many people know that, in the '90s Digital manufactured arrays of their 64-bit Alpha chips that were the main component of the Cray supercomputer, or that Digital had a 64-bit Alpha PC in the market, which could run either the "Unix-like" OpenVMS or a 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows NT?

Having steadily survived and adapted throughout the '70s, IBM stupidly gave away a large part of its own future to the upstart nonentity Microsoft, which produced the DOS OS for the IBM PC in 1984 and the subsequent DOS and Windows OSes. Microsoft systematically diversified in line with their core niche, effectively creating/making the market for PCs and the three-tier client-server architecture - pushing Digital, Novell and others aside in the process. Microsoft effectively led to the market precisely following the growth pattern of Nolan's Model.

Throughout all of this, the giant IBM - which used to create/make the markets and dominate them with its proprietary products and services - has had to progressively adapt and re-engineer/reinvent itself to survive all its setbacks. The setbacks include the collapse of its core market (mainframes), and the Microsoft lobotomy of its PC business, and the failure of its belated defence (IBM OS/2) with which it hoped to take back the market from Microsoft Windows. Despite all its setbacks, IBM is still a major force to be reckoned with.

Google is currently creating and making the markets, and dominating them with its proprietary products and services - it's a Golden Age.  Google management would be looking for the potential turning point when they cease to be able to continue doing that, and trying to prolong the Golden Age as far into the future as possible. When they can no longer prolong the Golden Age, they will need to emulate IBM's adaptability and self-reinvention if they are to survive in the longer term.

This post has barely scratched the surface. If you want to read more about what Google probably has ahead of them, look at the history of computing.

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