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."
Re:Duh
By BeerCat
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2014-Jan-19 10:18
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
I'd say they are becoming more like "Buy N Large" from Wall-E - all pervasive, all providing.
Never about search
By Orne
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2014-Jan-19 10:35
• Score: 3, Interesting
• Thread
The Google search engine was a byproduct of their want to serve advertisements to web browsing users (customers), and to provide better metrics to their clients (advertisers) so they could command higher rates. Once you see that, things like home automation, tracking energy usage, travel choices, etc are all means to an end of understanding what the user wants/needs then putting the best advertisement in front of the viewer.
Wrong.
By tpstigers
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2014-Jan-19 11:38
• Score: 4, Funny
• Thread
Google has always been in the data business. Putting sensors into our homes fits perfectly into that business model.
Re:Why fight it?
By MightyYar
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2014-Jan-19 12:04
• Score: 4, Informative
• Thread
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:Never about search
By IamTheRealMike
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2014-Jan-19 13:26
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
Er, no. Go read a history of Google. The search engine came first and for several years they had no idea how to fund it at all. They sold search services to Yahoo and Netscape. They put their code in a box and tried to sell the Google Search Appliance. They did a bunch of other random things before they eventually tried out keyword based advertising. To say the search engine was a byproduct of a desire to serve ads just makes you look like an idiot who is making stuff up as you go along.