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There's no delete button on the Web

mb — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 00:47:01 +0000

Google grudgingly added a delete button to Gmail a while ago, but they continue to prove that there's no delete button for the Web.

Today Google released one of the most powerful (and under-hyped) recent products, an archive of news articles going back to the 1700s. Did you know that the first use of the term 'email' was in 1772? Oh, wait, maybe all those articles on a technology not invented until the late 20th century are just OCR errors of old printed newspapers. In any case, articles that have long been forgotten and left for dead have now been resurrected and given a new lease on life, in a boon for content owners and citizens alike.

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoons wrote a snarky blog post about the death of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin. Adams found out today that the Web has no delete button after he deleted the post from his blog, but it proliferated across the Web anyway. As of this post it's still in Google's cache. And if Google removes it from their cache, plenty of bloggers have preserved Adams' sentiments for eternity - just search for [ crikey "crazy seal"].

I remember when Google themselves tried to hit the delete button to flush an inconvenient item down the memory hole, but until Google adds a delete button to the Web, that's gonna be difficult.

Games with a purpose

mb — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 01:11:00 +0000

I haven't posted in a while, since I didn't have much new to say. I hoped that the Buygoogle site would bring a new perspective on the company that might make the biggest difference in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but I haven't had many new perspectives lately. Hence the silence.

But there's been a good bit of discussion in the last week about Google's "Image Labler" game, and the observers who I respect may be missing the point -- so I'll break my silence for a contrasting view. Battelle goes on about the vocabulary, arguing with Google's choice of the term "label" instead of "tag"

I just wish Google would use the terminology the rest of the web has already settled upon. It's not a label. It's a tag. "Tag" means something - an intentional attribute given to an object on the web. That's what we are doing here.

Who cares what they call it, certainly not me. Battelle infers that Google is simply doing what others like Flickr have done, and simply assigning text attributes to help with searching. But there are signs that tagging isn't Google's objective here, no matter what you want to call it.

Philipp also sees the Image Labeler as simply a tagging exercise, using humans to annotate the Web:

More than a game, for Google this is a way to tag images using human brain power... to improve their image search results. I wonder if Google can reach critical mass with this game – enough players participating long enough to label many images – to ever make this relevant for their main image search. The idea of this approach isn’t new, but scaling it with the web will be tough.

But if we look at Google's longstanding aversion to human tagging, and join that with the recent acquisition of Neven Vision, you can see that there's likely a lot more to this than just getting people to label the Web for free.

Luis Von Ahn is the brain behind the ESP Game, which Google licensed to create the Image Labeler. Von Ahn talked to a Google audience about the ESP Game and other "games with a purpose" that he's developed to assign meaning to words and images on the Web. You can watch the entire 1-hour talk on Google Video, and see if you don't come away with the same impression that I did -- it's not about tagging or labeling, it's about machine learning.

Google was born out of a rebellion against human-edited directories of the Web that could not keep up with the Web's exponential growth, and were routinely manipulated by special interests willing to pay to subvert information for financial gain. Page and Brin put their faith in the computer algorithm, and to this day believe that the algorithm is faster, more comprehensive, and less biased than human editors.

Page and Brin may love the concept of the ESP Game and Google's Image Labeler because they take the good aspects of the social web and eliminate the crap that usually comes with user-generated content. For example, the ESP Game auto-corrects because each player must independently agree on the labels. And even if large group were to conspire to subvert results (i.e. hordes of Slashdot users all tag “monkey” to every image). the game automatically inserts known images into the stream, and if players don't guess known-good labels, the labels from those players are discarded. These "symmetric validation" and similar "asymmetric validation" methods result in extraordinarily reliable results.

Von Ahn points out that there is a lot of unused human capacity to do this grunt work. One slide (shown below) says that if people diverted the time they play solitaire to construction projects, they could build 1285 Empire State Buildings, or 450 Panama Canals every year. Why not have them label the Web?

Of course, this is all just a means to an end. And while other observers may think the end is a set of reliably tagged images, I think that's just an intermediate step. Because once Google has a set of images that are labeled with a high signal-to-noise ratio, this would be an ideal corpus of material for their newly acquired "machine vision" technology to train on. And once Google's computers are trained to interpret images and video, then Google's algorithms can do for images and video what they've done for text -- organize it and make it universally accessible and useful.

Indeed, Von Ahn alludes to that possibility in the video:

If we had this information for a lot of images, we could use this information for training computer vision algorithms....one of the major stumbling blocks [to effective computer vision algorithms] was a lack of training data...

And it's not just images that could benefit from this technique. The long-promised "semantic web" has been slow to realize because it's so difficult to generate all that meta-data. As Von Ahn says in the video when talking about another game under development to infer "common-sense facts" about about language:

Research projects have failed due to a lack of training data, since it is so tedious to key in all those common-sense facts. But if there was a fun game that could do it ...

Google used a large corpus of training documents to teach their computers to translate Arabic. Until now, there was no similar monster data set of reliable meta-data to train their computers to interpret images, or to infer meaning. With these games, Google may soon have a reliable training corpus for these purposes, too.

These are ingenious games with a purpose. But while many observers would point to the obvious purpose of "tagging," that's just a means to an end. The ultimate purpose is to feed the Google AI.

Google's secret weapon

mb — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 15:19:00 +0000

David Vise says investors should reward Google for investing in infrastructure, because their ability to deliver instant information is their real competitive advantage. By investing as fast as Google is, they're creating a wide competitive moat that is increasingly difficult for competitors to cross.

Where does Coca-Cola's competitive advantage lie? In its secret formula, most would say. But the real moat around the soft-drinks business is its powerful distribution system. Strangely enough, the same is true of Google.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page have known for years that the most formidable barrier to entry to Google's near-monopoly of internet search is not their unique algorithm. Rather it's the company's global network of thousands of stripped-down PCs that keeps competitors at bay. Investors don't seem to get this. When the search company's costs go up, they mark down its price. Instead they should applaud Google for building a moat around the business. Google secretly assembles PCs and optimizes them for search. The firm's continued hefty investment in capital expenditures is a sign that it has not changed its long-term focus on maintaining this competitive advantage merely to pump up quarterly financial results.

When Microsoft recently disclosed plans to ramp up capital spending by pouring billions of dollars into search, Wall Street thumbed its nose at the company and its stock. What Microsoft understood, but has failed to communicate clearly, is that its best hope of catching Google is to deploy its own network of linked personal computers capable of producing rapid and relevant search results.

Google users expect instant gratification. That reinforces the importance of continued hardware deployment and hefty capital investment, since delivering search results in a fraction of a second requires that data centers be as physically close to users as possible. If one data center has technical problems, queries are routed instantly and seamlessly to the next closest location. Google users never see any of this, but they remain addicted to the search engine because it instantly, and without fail, satisfies their curiosity.

With every dollar that Google spends on its computer network, it raises the barriers to entry to outsiders. Competitors may one day crack the search algorithm, but they'll have a hard time catching up.

Will new entrants bust the online ad market?

mb — Tue, 09 May 2006 19:29:03 +0000

Om Malik raises the specter of an "eyeball bust" on the arrival of new entrants to the online advertising market. He argues that, with Microsoft entering the market with its adCenter product, and with Yahoo revamping it's advertising vehicle, that there will be a supply glut and keyword prices will plummet, and the online advertising boom will bust:

The problem is that if three companies are chasing the same advertising dollars, the keyword prices would go down, which theoretically means, the publisher cut of the revenues are going to go down. Ergo… problems down the line.

The only problem is that this isn't how the economics of online advertising works. More companies chasing ad dollars will do nothing to prices, since those companies don't create supply or set prices.

It's like the stock market. In the stock market, you have companies selling shares and investors buying them. The brokers just facilitate transactions - they don't create supply, and they don't set prices.

In the online advertising market, you have people looking for things, and advertisers wanting their attention. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are brokers bringing the two groups together -- they don't create supply, and they don't set prices.

Prices are set by supply (of people looking for something) and demand (of advertisers selling something). Just because Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace or some startup decides to "chase the same advertising dollars" doesn't mean that any of them has created a larger supply of people searching for information, watching online video, or writing snarky blog posts. Just as the entry of a new broker into the stock market doesn't change the prices of securities, the entry of Microsoft or anyone else into the advertising market won't alter the supply-demand curve of that market.

Now if new products are created that make each click more (or less) relevant to the advertiser, then prices will rise (or fall). And if one broker is more (or less) effective at delivering interested customers to hungry advertisers, then the market share among the players will change -- but the overall pricing should not.

Understanding that Google and their competitors are marketplaces is important to understanding their prospects, and what could be next.

Microsoft adCenter is broken

mb — Fri, 05 May 2006 05:31:00 +0000

I signed up for a Microsoft adCenter account yesterday to give it a test drive. No time for a full review, so here are some highlights.

Seems like a complete rip-off of Google AdWords, from the UI right down to the name
Kind of irritating that they charge five bucks just to set up an account, maybe it's a low hurdle to keep the riff raff out?
I don't know how long it takes to get the ads to run, as 24 hours later my innocuous ads for pro camera equipment were still "pending approval" - when I first used Google AdWords two years ago, I was getting traffic from google.com within ten minutes
There are a couple neat-looking tools, like the charts that show search volumes by gender, psychographic segment, geography, "wealth index," etc. The vast majority of data points are in the "unclassified" column, and I don't know that I'd use this kind of targeting for my ads -- but I don't think Google has anything this fine-grained.
The user interface is faster and more responsive than AdWords, but it's maddeningly confusing. There's no place that I could find to upload keywords, and once I've laboriously typed in 80 keyword or phrases, I've got to go one-by-one to set broad, phrase or exact match. And once the keywords are in, how the heck do you edit them without deleting and reentering?
Most maddening of all, when setting up a second campaign, the keyword selection tool completely broke -- all keywords lost, the window looks funky, IE says there's an error on the page, and all navigation broke. Closed the browser, started a new session, logged back in, and it's still broken.

I can excuse some hiccups when a brand new product is launched. But if the adCenter functionality and UI is any indicator of ad performance, Microsoft has a loooong way to go to come close to Google or even Yahoo. Microsoft should cut its losses and partner up with Yahoo, and they'll be several years ahead of where they are today.

Maybe Microsoft should copy Google on one more thing and name it, "adCenter Beta."

Update 5/5/06 4:03 PM: I'm no longer getting errors when adding keywords, and was able to create a second campaign. But the first campaign I created 48 hours ago is still showing as "pending," and is not showing ads on any Microsoft site yet.

Update 5/7/06 3:46 PM: None of the ads for either of my campaigns is running yet. It's now been nearly *four days* and the campaigns are still showing in "pending" status. There's nothing controversial about the ads or keywords, and the landing pages exist. Does every ad need human review?

Update 5/9/06 9:08 PM: Ads in both campaigns finally started running about 36 hours ago, as far as I can tell. It's probably too early for a fair comparison, but I do have one ad that is identical to one I'm running with Google AdWords. For that ad, Google is delivering about 6 times the number of impressions that Microsoft is in a 24-hour period, but again it's probably too early for a fair comparison.

It's not an Excel killer, it's the Google Grid

mb — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 05:54:00 +0000

Google Spreadsheet. Some say it's an Excel killer. Others say it's a trivial toy. Some worry that there's no business model, while others think Google's just poking sticks at Microsoft.

I say it's another step on the path to the Google Grid. Store all your info online, choose what to publish and who can view and edit.

Sure it's a spreadsheet. Sure it's not nearly as capable as Excel. But it's not about the spreadsheet, or the calendar, or notebook, is it? These are all interesting and useful demo applications to refine and scale the Grid.

Vonage train wreck realized

mb — Wed, 24 May 2006 16:12:00 +0000

In the first three hours of trading as a public company Vonage stock is off 11%, after being down as much as 14%. Ouch.

As I explained two weeks ago, this thing is the anti-Google.

Vonage has a decent product, but they're losing shiploads of money every quarter while Google rakes in massive margins; Vonage founder Citron has a blemished reputation while Google's executive team is clean and the brand (used to be) squeaky clean; Vonage's high-priced product is competing in field of free alternatives and declining prices while Google built their business on free services that are immune to price competition.

I can't predict the future, and maybe Vonage will bounce back. But those who compared Vonage to Google because both courted the individual investor missed these big differences.

Vonage should never have been marketed to the unsophisticated investor.

Update 2:58 PM: Vonage ended its first day of trading down 12.6% from it's IPO price, "turning in the worst IPO debut in nearly two years" according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required).

Update 5/26 7:07 AM: Vonage dropped another 12.5% in its second day of trading, now down 24% from the IPO price. Sickening. Why would anyone buy stock from this guy?

Vonage IPO trainwreck

mb — Wed, 10 May 2006 05:57:00 +0000

As a customer of the Vonage VoIP service, I have the opportunity to participate in their IPO. How cool is that? Just go to the Vonage IPO website, read the prospectus, and sign up for an allocation of shares at the initial offering price range of $16-$18. Sweet.

Now, I bought into Google's IPO which worked out great, and I'm a fairly satisfied Vonage user, so buying into Vonage should be a sure thing, right? But after reading the Vonage prospectus, I'm staying far, far away from this one.

Let's take a little trip down memory lane and compare Google's story in the summer of 2004 with the Vonage story in the summer of 2006. We know how the Google story has evolved in two years, how will the Vonage story turn out?

IPO Auction

Google shocked Wall Street by opening the IPO to individual investors through a Dutch auction process. Each investor independently determines how much a share of stock is worth and enters a bid in the auction. Winning bidders pay the clearing price, losing bidders get nothing.
Vonage opened their IPO to Vonage customers, though there's no auction. Up to 13.5% of the total offering is reserved for customers, but if it is oversubscribed, a pro-rata allocation reduces the number of shares for each investor. Investors receive an allocation, they don't name a price.

Profitability

In the summer of 2004, Google was extraordinarily profitable, growing 125% year-over-year, and stealing market share. Of $423 in net revenue in Q2'04, Google delivered $171 million in operating income - a 40% operating margin. Incredibly, Google's margins have expanded since then, delivering a 48% operating margin in Q1'06, so that they earn 48 cents for every $1 in net revenue.
Today, Vonage sales are growing rapidly, but operating margin is a whopping *negative* 102% for 2005. Vonage has no retained earnings, but has instead a $467 million accumulated deficit. Vonage is spending $2 for every $1 in revenue, and Vonage warns that there is no end in sight for the massive losses. At this rate, they'll eat through the IPO cash in about 20 months.

Prospects

Google had a lock on the online advertising market in 2004, and you could see that Google had a big R&D and ad network advantage over the competition. Keyword prices were rising, and Google's position looked secure. Google was making a ton of money offering free services to users, so price competition seemed unlikely.
Vonage is the biggest player in a nascent market, but they're already seeing price competition driving down monthly fees. It's going to be tough to compete charging $30 a month for a service that Skype and every IM player provides for less, and that every cable company and telco is bundling with TV and broadband.

Reputation

Google and their founders had a squeaky clean reputation. The only blemish was when Google's founders were embarrassed by an interview given to Playboy that was published during the "quiet period" before the IPO. Nothing illegal or unethical or even questionable, but awkward all the same.
Vonage's "founder, chairman and chief strategist" Jeffrey Citron has a whole section in the prospectus dedicated to his dicey background. The SEC has alleged that Citron "participated in an extensive fraudulent scheme" prior to joining Vonage, paid "extensive fines," and was banned from the securities industry. The prospectus says that banks and accounting firms have refused to do business with Vonage because of these issues. Ugly stuff.

By looking at profitability, prospects and reputation in August, 2004, you could see that Google had a bright future -- and the investor who bet on that combination has seen Google shares appreciate nearly five-fold.

But looking at the same factors for Vonage, and one can only come to the opposite conclusion. Opening the Vonage IPO to customers is likely to be a curse, not a gift.

Google and the market for TV ads

mb — Wed, 10 May 2006 04:01:00 +0000

BuyGoogle has been beating the drum that a great way to understand the mechanics and motives of Google is to view it as a marketplace. Now there's more evidence of Google's true character -- Google is bidding to provide a marketplace for TV advertising.

360techblog reports that eBay and Google are competing to replace the old-fashioned "up front" method of selling TV ads, which requires advertisers to commit a year in advance for ad slots. In its place would be a real-time auction. So if you thought that Google and eBay were on a collision course, now they're directly competing for a truly gigantic ($100 billion?) market.

Next time some Google action doesn't make sense, don't think about Google as a search engine, or a media company, or a content provider, or a portal, or a software developer -- Google is an info marketplace.

(via Battelle)

Google and the Paradox of Choice

mb — Sun, 07 May 2006 20:03:00 +0000

In his book The Paradox of Choice, author Barry Schwartz says that contrary to conventional wisdom, giving people many choices is often bad for them:

When presented with many choices, many people experience "choice paralysis" and do nothing, even when doing nothing is the worst possible choice. For example, give people 20 choices of mutual funds in their 401k, and many more will just let their money sit in a low-yield money market fund than if they only had a few choices.
When people do select from a large field of alternatives, whether for consumer products or life partners, they usually experience greater "buyer's remorse" than those who selected from a small number of alternatives.

If you don't have time to read the book, you can watch a fascinating 1-hour presentation Schwartz gives at Google. (Better to download the video and watch it on the Google Video Player since it's much higher resolution that in the Flash player on the site.)

One way to solve the paradox, Schwartz argues, is to hire an agent to do the choosing for you, so you don't have to suffer the consequences of choice (choice paralysis or buyer's remorse). So when a real estate agent shows you three homes, or an insurance broker presents a small handful of options, Schwartz says you may not make the perfect selection out of all possibilities, but you're more likely to take *some* action, and to feel better about it later.

Google is an agent for finding information, and the relevance of their results helps hide much of the irrelevant crap that's out there. But according to Schwartz, the sheer volume of results may be leaving searchers with an inability to choose, or bad feelings about their choices. To remedy this Schwartz recommends that Google develop "hierarchical searching" where people can choose from a small set of branches, and narrow down from there what they're looking for -- a series of choices from a small number of alternatives rather than a bewildering set of thousands of results.

Seems like Google's doing this already with some searches, like for jobs, cars, homes, and health.

Arms race and industry consolidation

mb — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 17:40:00 +0000

The online arms race has officially begun.

What Google does best is to "deliver innovation at scale," solving difficult problems for a global user base. While Google has been quietly investing huge sums in building out their massive infrastructure, Microsoft has been busy doing what they do best -- developing desktop software, marketing and throwing chairs.

Despite vicious threats to "f***ing kill Google," it seems that Microsoft is just now waking up to the reality that to kill Google in the market for online services, Microsoft will need something it surprisingly doesn't have -- scale. So Ray Ozzie promises to spend "staggering amounts of money" to build out Microsoft's data centers and to develop a "Live Drive" to compete with Google's rumored Gdrive or Google Grid.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, which is losing money in MSN and seeing revenue and market share fall year-over-year, it really will take staggering amounts of cash to catch up. This reality dawned on Microsoft investors this morning, who sold Microsoft stock en masse after Microsoft announced they would be investing another $2 billion to build out their online services infrastructure.

Microsoft stock is down this morning more than 11% - losing $30 billion in market capitalization - which is a much more staggering amount of money than the $2 billion Microsoft will invest this year in MSN. Maybe investors are not only worried about a money pit of investment weighing down future earnings, but they also wonder whether Microsoft can ever catch up with Google just by writing big checks.

A Wall Street Journal article this morning (sub req'd) quotes a Goldman analyst saying that Microsoft spending is "snowballing," while another analyst wonders if Microsoft's investments "will be a fruitful exercise or a dog chasing its tail."

With $35 billion in the bank, Microsoft certainly has the cash to win the arms race. But it's doubtful that Microsoft has the know-how, at least not today. Google has already built out out a global, distributed computing infrastructure that gets a lot of bang for every buck. And Google's engineers have built a company around online information services, while Microsoft's engineers have built a company around personal desktop software.

In short, Google has a huge head start. If Google keeps going fast, Microsoft can't catch up just by spending a lot of money.

For smaller competitors like Yahoo, eBay and Amazon, it's increasingly clear that none of them has the resources to participate in this arms race. For them, consolidation is coming. Let's hope Google participates in the consolidation, and uses its own cash hoard to deny critical capabilities to the competition.

Google PC and a billion bucks to Dell

mb — Thu, 04 May 2006 00:20:00 +0000

Maybe Google's gonna go for it and challenge Microsoft on their home turf, the desktop PC. CNET thinks so.

Until last week, Google was able to pretend that Microsoft wasn't their biggest threat. That charade ended when Microsoft said they would make a $2 billion down payment on a big mortgage to kill Google (giving Microsoft stock a $32 billion black eye), and Google gave themselves a PR fat lip by complaining to the Feds about Microsoft's anti-competitive nature and getting unfairly accused of hypocrisy.

Now the gloves are off and the arms race has begun. Microsoft and Amazon teamed up on search and possibly advertising, and the thought of a "Yahoosoft" mashup has sparked talk of consolidation in the information industry.

The thought of Microsoft multiplying 90% of the world's desktops by the user base of Amazon, plus the search and advertising savvy of Yahoo, raised to the power of 2 billion bucks, has spooked investors. Google shares are down 10% since announcing surprisingly strong first quarter results on April 20.

Since there's no more pretending that Microsoft and Google aren't each other's Public Enemy Number One, there's no reason for Google not to go for the jugular -- the desktop. It's clear that Microsoft will use their dominance of PC operating systems to try to crush Google in online services, while Google has a lot of benefits to offer the desktop user, and a lot of experience designing cheap, reliable, network-attached systems.

There's been occasional speculation about a Google PC for some time now, culminating at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. But at the show, Larry Page just toyed with the audience, hinting around by showing off the MIT Media Lab's $100 hand-crank laptop and releasing Google Pack (yawn), along with an upgrade of Google Video - but saying nothing explicit about a Google PC. At the time, a spokesperson said that Google had no interest in building consumer hardware, preferring to work instead with their hardware partners.

Putting together the puzzle pieces, we find:

Microsoft threat calls for a desktop strategy
Today's complex, unreliable PCs keep users from accessing Google
The cost of today's PCs keeps them out of reach for many people
Rumors of a Gdrive or Google Grid for network storage were confirmed in the leaked presentation slides
Cost and complexity could be drastically reduced with open-source software and network storage
Google already has many of the applications that would be needed (Desktop, Picasa, Gmail, Calendar, Writely, Maps, Blogger, Sketchup)
Google's Wi-Fi ambitions could open up network access for millions, driving usage of a cheap, wireless Google PC

The final piece of the puzzle is the hardware partner to produce these cheap boxes. Was I the only one surprised to hear that Google was paying Dell a billion dollars to install the free Google Toolbar and Google Desktop on its machines?

I hope Google is getting more for its billion dollars than that - could Dell be producing a $249, stripped down, reliable, network-attached, no spyware, no Microsoft, Google PC? If so, it would be a perfect Mother's Day present for my mom.

Microsoft dances with Yahoo?

mb — Wed, 03 May 2006 09:00:22 +0000

The Wall Street Journal's venerable Heard on the Street column speculates (subscription required) that Microsoft and Yahoo could do a big deal together.

The article says Microsoft could sell MSN to Yahoo, though it seems terribly unlikely that Microsoft would spin off their online services, the new heart of Microsoft's strategy. Maybe Microsoft could buy a stake in Yahoo, giving it access to Yahoo's ad system in exchange for cash and traffic from Vista and IE7 default search. Or Microsoft could do an outright acquisition, which is also unlikely because it would be a huge deal when Microsoft's stock price is already devalued.

If this happens, looks like eBay is out in the cold, and Amazon's still a question mark (though they did just dump Google search for Microsoft Live).

The article did nail the two big issues -- technology and users. Yahoo has a big user base and adequate search and ad technology, while Microsoft potentially has many users in Vista and IE7, but badly lagging technology.

Steve "Monkey Boy" Ballmer says he's changed his tune from " developers developers developers developers developers" to " advertisers advertisers advertisers advertisers advertisers." Seems to me Microsoft is in a bad place because they *didn't* invest in R&D until too late. Trying to recruit advertisers without an ad system or traffic seems a bit bass-ackwards.

That's why it's an arms race, and consolidation is coming .

Could censorship hurt Google's stock price?

mb — Wed, 03 May 2006 07:32:00 +0000

Conventional wisdom holds that Google compromised their principles so they could make a ship load of money in China. But tomorrow's Wall Street Journal has a good opinion piece on Google's censorship problem (subscription required) that argues that Google's stock price could be at risk alongside it's Don't Be Evil ethic.

Looks like I'm not the only one who will use Google's shareholder meeting on May 11 to protest the fact that Google, the company that wants to "organize the world's information," has compromised its principles and built a sophisticated censorship system. Amnesty International plans a media campaign to coincide with the shareholder meeting to raise awareness of this issue.

It's not just about being a "do-gooder," but Google's censorship could hurt its brand, and its stock price:

Shareholders should take heed, and not just because it's morally repugnant to collaborate with repression. In the short term, it's obviously good business to be in China, but there are longer-term consequences that should be considered.

Tech companies say they have no choice ...

American tech companies say they are simply complying with the laws of the land to avoid getting kicked out.

... but that's an illogical argument and a rationalization.

But they could resist more forcefully, as they do when protesting China's failure to protect intellectual property. They are willing to cave on human rights for a simple and understandable reason: They feel they can't afford not to be in China.

Should Google get credit for "agonizing" over their decision, when they ultimately caved?

Google says it agonized over launching a censored, local search engine early this year. But the company decided that offering is better than its older offshore service, which was slower than services of Chinese competitors and vulnerable to wholesale government shutdowns.

For Google, this issue is bigger than China. Google has destroyed user trust and tarnished the Google brand.

There also is the risk to tech companies' reputations. Yahoo and Google have faced a PR backlash, including an unflattering congressional hearing that has helped take the shine off of Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto. There's a reason companies respond to political pressure on human-rights issues, as many did during the Apartheid era in South Africa: To protect their most important bottom-line asset -- their brand.

As Google demonstrated when it stood up to the US DoJ, resistance isn't futile.

Censorship is the solution

mb — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 00:33:00 +0000

Today's Da Vinci Code puzzle is puzzling on another level -- the solution to the puzzle is the word "censorship".

With all the angst Google went through deciding to implement a massive censorship program in China, would Google intentionally trivialize censorship as the answer to this fun puzzle game? Or was this an Easter egg of sorts by the team that designed the game?

Or maybe it's a riff on the widespread censorship of the Da Vinci Code book itself?

Interestingly (ironically?) the Da Vinci Code movie was approved for release in China on May 19 along with the rest of the world.