Actually, It's Google That's Eating the World 205
waderoush writes "An Xconomy column [Friday] suggests that Google is getting too big. When the company was younger, most of its acquisitions related to its core businesses of search, advertising, network infrastructure, and communications. More recently, it's been colonizing areas with a less obvious connection to search, such as travel, social networking, productivity, logistics, energy, robotics, and — with the acquisition this week of Nest Labs — home sensor networks and automation. A Google acquisition can obviously mean a big payoff for startup founders and their investors, but as the company grows by accretion it may actually be slowing innovation in Silicon Valley (since teams inside the Googleplex, with its endless fountain of AdWords revenue, can stop worrying about making money or meeting market needs). And by infiltrating so many corners of consumers' lives — and collecting personal and behavioral data as it goes — it's becoming an all-encompassing presence, and making itself ever more attractive as a target for marketers, data thieves, and government snoops. 'Any sufficiently advanced search, communications, and sensing infrastructure is indistinguishable from Big Brother,' the column argues."
No, dorks. (Score:5, Interesting)
SV went from scientists and engineers selling a new product they invented to a bunch of dorks who are trying to get rich quick.
When I see someone with an over inflated ego call herself a JavaScript "Engineer" (engineer?! Oh, please!) who is has this incredible "innovation" (Just Another Fucking Social Media/Pimp Subscriber's Data for Ads and Marketing software), I just shake my head and see that SV has jumped the shark,
I AM seeing some incredible innovations in healthcare in ...wait for it ... India. American trained Indian doctors are giving superior healthcare at a fraction of the price to some of the poorest people on Earth. And the docs are STILL making a very nice living - if not more because of the processes they invented. Win/win!!
THAT is exciting and Innovative.
Re:News at 11. Google is evil. (Score:0, Interesting)
Actually, no. Geeks stopped using google many years ago. It's the masses of sheep out there that still use it, and the defense of google comes from google shills for the most part.
The rest of us? We moved on, when it became clear google was evil.
Re:Why fight it? (Score:5, Interesting)
I looked into this recently, and was kind of surprised at what I found.
Mostly, my surprise is that they aren't that big. By revenue, they are 55th on the Fortune 500 list. For comparison, Dell is 51. Now Google is far more profitable, has a much larger market cap, and is growing very quickly... but still, I was shocked that they aren't larger. If you get a lot of your news from tech press like I do, then you could be led to believe that Google is swallowing up the world. But in fact, they are still smaller than Amazon, smaller than Microsoft, half the size of IBM, and 1/3 the size of Apple. Google definitely gets an outsized amount of press attention compared to their revenue, and get blamed for a lot of things that their size just doesn't support.
Re:Hipsters are killing (have killed?) SV. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Silicon Valley used to be a truly remarkable place. It was where industry and the future truly did collide head-on. And because of this, great things happened there."
Detroit used to be a truly remarkable place. It was where industry and the future truly did collide head-on. And because of this, great things happened there.
Name me a single hotbed of innovation anywhere in the world from any historic period which was still a hotbed of innovation 50 years later.
Re:Hipsters are killing (have killed?) SV. (Score:2, Interesting)
Carly Fiorina's tenure at HP, is the most visible example of a trend that began in the mid-1990's. It was a process of the intellectual hollowing-out of silicon valley, by the "professional management" that the VC's insisted was necessary. For years, the industry press predicted that it was ripe for consolidation. Then the consolidation happened. VC's thought they were "cutting fat" - but in reality, they were throwing the baby out with the bathwater. When most acquisition strategies consisted of "buy your competition and shut them down" - (while the FTC and SEC looked the other way; because they got to cash-in as well) - lack of competition allowed the big players to stagnate. This process reached it's peak with the 1999 market crash (but famously continued over the next several years, in a massive bloodletting of IT/software workers). The only thing that rescued the industry was the massive bloated defense spending that started in 2001. When that exploded the housing bubble - it cut the bottom out as workers fled to other industries. (or retired). I think the real death-knell was when Oracle bought Sun. The other shoe has not dropped yet - but that's coming.
Re:The beta will kill Slashdot if it goes live. (Score:4, Interesting)
If the beta goes live, I'll have to find some other site with decent comments and wide-ranging topics of general interest to nerds. Any suggestions? Because I'd rather not have to turn to Reddit.