Google Passes Microsoft’s Market Value as PC Loses to Web
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
They want to "organize the world's information", but that's less than half the story - an even bigger challenge is making all this information not only understandable and usable to humans but making it all work seamlessly together - a monumental task they are barely getting started at.
Unrelated (but necessary) they also seem to be doing very well at the organizational aspect of absorbing new ideas and companies and integrating them into themselves.
This isn't about bandwidth. It's about content. The only thing standing
between YouTube and the CableTV providers is bandwidth.
If Google cracks the bandwidth nut, they can essentially replace TimeWarner,
Comcast, etc. in one fell swoop because they can easily replace 100% of the
services those companies offer at a fraction of the cost.
...
The reality is that as long as we have privately owned and operated metro networks, google's bandwidth access will be limited to the few metro areas that consent to their access requirements (and that's assuming the big telcos aren't able to successfully lobby against this incentive, as they've been successful in doing in the past).
The answer is publically owned, and privately operated metro networks. This is a dream that will never come to pass in America, and Google's ambition will remain just that: an unrealized dream.
Sorry for being such a Debbie downer, but bandwidth in the US is a really massive problem that won't be solved by one search engine or one company. We really need a national reform effort.
Google (or whoever else) could simply create their own suburbs/towns/cities from scratch, streamlined construction and all, on cheap land bought in bulk in the desert out west. Not everyone would move, but many people would, especially if it was all managed by what they perceive as a trustable tech-savvy company like google. The might even cost them nothing if they would simply ask for pre-sale deposits.
It's a crazy idea but there's nothing difficult technically or financially to make it happen. There's probably at least 1 million customers who would sign up day 1.
Better to create urban islands to both increase the re-urbanization trend and make the US overall more efficient, and extend those out.
Transportation, distribution and logistics, communications, and other infrastructure would be radically simplified.
Google depends on people having a good browser and a good connection to the net. Competition and progress had stagnated in the existing markets. By bringing out Chrome, they got Microsoft and Mozilla interested in security and excited about implementing new stuff again.
Hopefully they can do it for broadband too.
Just the fact that they transported us to other countries so everyone with an internet connection could go to Paris is laudable. And now they're going to explore the final frontier of Earth underwater.
After iPhone and iPad, like them or not, Google is the one of the "big" companies the most involved in inventing the future.
As you get information regarding what you're seeing, Google is logging everything you see.
A map with with a line detailing everywhere you've been over the course of years. A video displaying everything you saw on your real trip to Paris or wherever else-- not based on what you saw that day, but based on the information Google has about that area, those landmarks, etc.
Privacy could cease to exist while you're wearing Google Glass.
Taking a paranoid and oversimplified approach to privacy makes it's more difficult to have the complex, nuanced discussions necessary to actually protect privacy in meaningful ways.
Keeping detailed notes on everywhere you go isn't something that would be done as lightly as putting on a pair of glasses. You would consider the implications of the existence of that data before keeping it. With something like Glass, that part of the process gets skipped.
The argument for trusting Google with your data is that their privacy policy keeps your data safe. I don't doubt that Google has the best of intentions, but that doesn't mean my data is safe. A snooping employee, a change in policy that isn't necessarily over the line but isn't comforting either, security breaches, subpoenas (in the spirit of http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/may/8/twitter-fight...). There are a lot of ways that having that data in someone else's pocket can backfire.
Yes, it would be fine if there were some guarantee that no one could ever see my data. There isn't. It was not my intention to oversimplify anything. The last thing I want is to cause damage to the cause.
Edit: grammar
At least Google Glass is an _opt-in_ form of monitoring and observation. If you don't want to wear it, you don't have to. If you want to take it off, you can. Those aspects alone mean it's a lot less worrisome than existing, and much more involuntary, invasions of our privacy.
Sounds about right to me and I'd be extremely skeptical of any claims to the contrary. The default result of any data entering a computer system owned by someone else is that it is no longer private. Specifically the US, the government considers any data held by a commercial entity to be fair game.
Compare to:
Privacy could cease to exist while you're chatting on Facebook
As for your second paragraph, I already voiced my concerns on that. The implications of opting-in are not well-considered by the average consumer. It's taken for granted that personal data is protected.
Posting this for nsmartt because maxvisit.
If you "have nothing to hide", it's not a big deal. If you're fighting for custody of your child, transgender, gay, a targeted minority, visit a psychologist regularly, or even just happen to do a few things one day that could be misconstrued, all of a sudden, the potential of it taking off becomes a very big deal - sometimes much more so than current privacy issues.
It's really hard to point at Glass and say it's materially different from the broad array of recording devices already out there. If you're someone trying to avoid being recorded, those are a much bigger problem - they're pervasive, generally have better viewpoints (can see more total area) and often have built-in illumination as well.
Sort of like.. hmm.. cell phones?
You lost this privacy years ago, at least to governments.
Privacy hasn't died yet. The problem isn't that Google Glass exists or that cell phones exist. The problem is awareness. The problem is the same for cell phones.
Still, it's a significant thing I suppose. But we tend to ignore the cash position of companies in stories like this. If Google suddenly paid out 100 billion to shareholders tomorrow then it's market value would rightly drop by about 100 billion, but that wouldn't mean Microsoft was suddenly winning again.
Seriously, that Google has lapped the larger part of what was the Microsoft / Intel juggernaut of the last century is notable of course, but I wonder if its the wrong question.
Let's observe the quoted, albeit stale, Google market capitalisation of $249.2 billion with a current vega-weighted mean implied volatility (market's opinion of what Google's volatility will be) of 31.12% and the quoted Microsoft market cap of $248.7 billion with an IV index of 22.51%. The question is, assuming these two Gaussian random variables vary independently [1], what is the probability that GOOG is still bigger than MSFT in one year? The answer is a hair above 50%. Plugging in $249.65 billion for Google and $248.02 billion for Microsoft (closer to present values) this probability rises closer to 51%.
Conclusion: insufficient evidence that this is more than random market jittering just yet.
[1] If this were more than a quick, stylised analysis I'd construct a covariance matrix or copula to describe the dependency structure. Given the razor thin odds, however, it is unlikely that correlation will help the OP's case too much.
I have, unfortunately, seen a great many things beyond the shade of doubt come back and bite people.
Note, too, that GOOG has a 9% higher beta than MSFT and that we are in a rising market. We cannot let our ex ante biases colour our attributions.
To the extent it is about Google, this is really about commoditization of software : Google is commodotizing the whole OS into the (free) browser. They are commodotizing office software into free Google Apps. They are showing that if you do it at scale and over the web you can operate at such efficiency that you basically give people all this stuff Microsoft charges for and still make huge amounts of money from the advertising revenue, or you can have pay model where the costs are an order of magnitude less than what MS needs to survive in its current form.
2) The web is useless with out Personal Computers or personal computing devices such as smart phones so the web hasn't lost to the PC and the PC hasn't lost to the web, they need each other.
I think Google's got better at getting people to click on ads. For example, one of the following is a search result and the other is an ad. How many people can differentiate between them on various monitors?
I remember the time when Google differentiated itself by clearly marking ads, now it's no longer true for high value keywords.
Advertising revenue in 2011 was 97 percent of Google's revenue!
There are also limits on disguising search results as ads.
>For the rest, there's not much short of an acknowledgement overlay that will get the message across reliably (for text ads -- image ads are easier, but google doesn't have them)
Really? Just increasing the contrast or adding a border around the border or using extra spacing as a separator or another separator can help a lot. But it's hard to make changes that hurt the bottom line. Changing it the opposite way is much easier. Google has a lot of UI and UX experts and I don't think the changes are accidental at all. In fact, they must be very carefully planned.
Edit: Found an old screenshot where the difference is much more apparent.
In terms of industry norms, Google is about as good as it gets. Maybe you feel that's not enough, and I guess that's a qualitative judgment that you're free to make. People will differ on things like this occasionally :P. I'd ask for some kind of harm analysis at the very least before I accept that there's anything untoward going on.
I believe these are relatively recent changes, earlier the background was blue or purple. I guess Google "optimized" the color and appearance to gain more clicks.
Sure, maybe everyone is replacing their car with a motorcycle, but then the car is losing to the motorcycle, not the highway.
The PC as a platform for running your applications and holding your data is on its way out, being replaced by the web. The PC, the box you run your browser on, will remain, but the applications you run will only see the browser on one side and their Unix-like OS on the other.
"Ads related to mesothelioma:"
Stop this trolling. You're quite simply lying to people with that kind of nonsense. It doesn't belong anywhere, much less here.
If someone can post the full screenshot, please do.