The notes from interviewing Roger

hopefully this will keep the colour difference when I cut and paste from word ...


Do you think that Google will encounter increased resistance and interference in its business strategies from the EU, the UN, USA (Justice Department) in regard to how it pushes the legal “boundaries”?- data/search privacy (Google reduces its data anonymisation from 18 to 9months)- censorship by pressure from national governments (Google at the behest of a number of western governments has filtered out Nazi sites)- censorship via business pressure from national governments (Google does very well in China because it censors “sensitive to the government” sites from hits – e.g. free Tibet)

· There are four possible areas that could lead resistance against Google (see bottom) most are ineffectual. Controls by the Regulators (one of the four) has been lukewarm at best. EU’s Article 29 has “forced” Google to reduce the length of time it keeps data to 9 months when it should have aimed for the life of a search session.Google has/is very adept at being able to impose censorship (as with the People’s Republic of China and not share any of the blame – partially on its catch-cry “do no evil” when it can be argued it does evil – simply doing nothing is tacit acceptance of evil.

With the increased concern over privacy and conflict with freedom of information do you think that Google has “painted itself into a corner” from a business perspective? i.e. is Google in danger of losing flexibility which is a key asset for any organisation.

· Not Yet. This may happen when there is a competitor in the market that really wants to challenge Google for position.

With Google applying censorship do you think that this will compromise its search engine and make it more vulnerable to a better tool (censoring will impose a time burden that the new tool will be able to exploit)?

No. The development team working on improving the search engine would be acutely aware of the potential for slowing response times and guard against that. Restructuring the hit list can be argued as evidence of this.

Is imposing a penalty to organisations like KinderStart censorship or a legitimate business response to protect its revenue source from being compromised?

· Google’s action is legitimate countermeasure against “gaming the system”.

Will Google be forced to affect its own search tool if a finding as in the KinderStart case went against Google? Thus the courts have in effect damaged Google’s ability to protect its revenue sources and to innovate and develop its products?

The courts may in the future make findings against Google but everything to date has not affected Google’s approach to its business and the methods it has used to protect same.

Undertaking a service to provide a digital index of every newspaper (from local to national) globally provide a great temptation to potentially manipulate items to the advantage of another party (a la George Orwell’s 1984)? Does this represent an attempt to “undermine” most national collections of their own newspapers?Are there controls that we should impose to ensure the security of a potential national asset?What are your views?Is this another form of censorship as initially it can be seen that western nationals newspapers would be the logical choice to digitise – thus a censoring of those who are not from a first world nation.

Can be seen as a process to undermine the Press. However the Media and Google have a very good relationship. This could be because the media see that they are losing sway via print and that Google offers an alternative that they can use to maintain presence and revenue feeding off Google’s Advertisement revenue empire. The danger with digitising all the newspapers is that people are lazy and that the amount of veracity checking will reduce – national collections can be seen to “cut their losses” and not keep their own data and become totally reliant on a third party – Google.Only three newspaper sites are “protected” from crawlerbots –
WSJ (Wall Street Journal),
AFR(?? Australian Financial Review), and the
FT (Financial Times)

-----

There are only four groups that can potentially can force Google to change its ways:
1. National (and International) Regulators;
2. The Media;
3. Individuals en masse (though this needs an event to promote universal condemnation); and
4. Public Interest Groups (of two forms).
Public Interest groups Business Aligned
PI EFF
EPIC (European) CDT
APF
Canadian
EFA
Public interest groups have been gaining traction in discussions with Google – heightened when some of their launches have missed the target.

Google have been consistently failing to understand local (national/regional) cultures. In launching Street view in Australia although warned of concerns over a number of items – such as displaying women’s refuges, people, aboriginal communities, private places – such as private roads, infants schools etc, they published without taking counsel. This created an unexpected backlash and caused a “hasty” retreat. Mechanism for requesting data be removed from the street view is hidden in the help function – not obvious. Removal is not instantaneous in some cases items remained for days. The current removal process still identifies issues as it highlights that something has been removed – Google now have to work on removing the blank space so to give the impression of continuity – not yet done.

Major weakness:
· Googleplex (the Senior Management) understands technology but not culture and to a major extent people from a social perspective (as in community structures (cities, states, nations).
· Believes that technology can solve everything and they ride roughshod over the rest. A sign of immaturity.
· Would benefit from appointing “culture gurus” to advise them on local sensitivities before launching – and thus creating bad publicity
· Upsetting the media could also become a major issue – but is currently managed very well. Currently Google has neutralised public bad perceptions though its media savvy and associations.
· Google has a very weak statement – when you can find it privacy statement with their products. The privacy statements are not consistent across their product range.
· Google has not looked at its algorithm with Business Intelligence (BI) – Microsoft and IBM are paying serious attention to this new market space – that was created by Google’s push for a simplistic search approach.

Big Brother Google
Stages:
1. Content Discovery ServicesGoogle have the largest coverage reference listhave the smartest precedence algorithm (for sorting the results)designed for the lowest common denominator and one of the reasons for its successmultiple constrained searches (images, blogs and Froogle)does provide multiple extension services (Answers and Scholar)
2. Content ServicesGoogle EarthGoogle BaseYouTube/Google VideoGoogle NewsGoogle Library/Print
3. Data about Users“We are moving to a Google that knows more about you” Google CEO 10 Feb 2005 – very Big Brotherishachieved via:-search terms, IP-addresses, click trail, click throughs, email accounts (Gmail), cookies, desktop, free wireless IAP, Ad syndication (AdSense), Orkut (the Google Facebook), consumer profiles, psych profiles from online games, Google now owns a tool for ad placement in games, face recognition (within images)

Google Mythology “Do No Evil”Protecting users’s privacy is very important to Google … No!
DIY Privacy Protection
Google’s Privacy statement

How Vulnerable is Google on Search?

Answer - seems static an invulnerable to minor advancements in other engines. Some potential for hubris.

Read Write Web

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Questions for Roger Clarke

· Do you think that Google will encounter increased resistance and interference in its business strategies from the EU, the UN, USA (Justice Department) in regard to how it pushes the legal “boundaries”?- data/search privacy (Google reduces its data anonymisation from 18 to 9months)- censorship by pressure from national governments (Google at the behest of a number of western governments has filtered out Nazi sites)- censorship via business pressure from national governments (Google does very well in China because it censors “sensitive to the government” sites from hits – e.g. free Tibet)

· With the increased concern over privacy and conflict with freedom of information do you think that Google has “painted itself into a corner” from a business perspective? i.e. is Google in danger of losing flexibility which is a key asset for any organisation.

· With Google applying censorship do you think that this will compromise its search engine and make it more vulnerable to a better tool (censoring will impose a time burden that the new tool will be able to exploit)?

· Is imposing a penalty to organisations like KinderStart censorship or a legitimate business response to protect its revenue source from being compromised?

· Will Google be forced to affect its own search tool if a finding as in the KinderStart case went against Google? Thus the courts have in effect damaged Google’s ability to protect its revenue sources and to innovate and develop its products?

· Undertaking a service to provide a digital index of every newspaper (from local to national) globally provide a great temptation to potentially manipulate items to the advantage of another party (a la George Orwell’s 1984)? Does this represent an attempt to “undermine” most national collections of their own newspapers?Are there controls that we should impose to ensure the security of a potential national asset?What are your views?Is this another form of censorship as initially it can be seen that western nationals newspapers would be the logical choice to digitise – thus a censoring of those who are not from a first world nation.

Porter's 5 forces for Google

Repost from James original in full.

Force	Impact on Google
Supplier/Power	Google is regionally not globally dominant. Competition Elimination and Substitution: Microsoft embedding their search tool into their Explorer browser. Threat of forward integration – Google search may not perform as well with new software releases from Microsoft and Apple.
Barriers to Entry (Potential for New Market Entrants)	Yahoo & Microsoft have radically improved their search engines and can on pass/deploy their search tool through their products. There is no such thing as the perfect search engine – thus a better search engine invented by another will critically affect Google – mayhap even mortally as 40% of the company revenue comes from advertising which is driven through the search engine. Online marketing and the rules governing what is good and bad practices (e.g. cloaking <reference>) are still evolving – this could affect Google’s current technology and philosophy. Switching costs are mostly related to hardware (storage of indices and speed of information return) and accuracy related (webbots/crawlers) Search tools are easily scalable. While there is currently not a great degree of ‘legislative interference’ this will most likely change <web reference to Google and Big Brother>
Competitive Rivalry (Degree of Rivalry)	<Level>. Rules/ethic have not been defined so the environment is easily exploited or manipulated. Currently there are only a few rivals (Microsoft, Yahoo) so the degree of rivalry is more oriented to an oligarchy – this could bring attention of UN or individual countries as a restriction of trade in the future. Switching costs for most of the search tools are nothing. Brand identity is important (if not paramount – Google has made the language as a noun and a verb) Rival search tools are not dissimilar to Google’s tool. Search tools are also used without overt referencing (which impinges on their discoverability) – eBay’s search tool is Google. Improving on the search engine and its features is a significant task for a large number of highly skilled IT technologists.
Treat of Substitutes (Product & Technology) Development	High. Switching costs are negligible Buyer inclination to substitute is primarily driven by speed and accuracy of the result and also by the overt pushing of ads that are included with the search results and pages. Users of the search tool are demanding more services and complexity or sophistication with the search tool to remain ‘loyal’ to its use. Ad Revenue is directly related to use - - even the loss of a small percentage of use can mean significant revenue loss to Google or the other search generating companies. Technology requires extremely skilled staff – high degree of competition for a limited pool. Loss of company/trade secrets if skilled staff more from one search generating organisation to another.
Buyer Power	Use of the search rankings is a significant leverage point by the owners of search tools in bargaining. Loss of ranking has in the past led to costly legal arguments – equivalent of e_defamation_of_character or denial of services <add references> Users of the search tool are becoming more sophisticated and demanding other services also for free. Substitutes are available – and for the same price: free No real reviews are undertaken on what features the web community would like to see so each search company employs researches to straw poll/guess directions. Two client groups – web community wanting to search/locate items and the organisations selling products – have to satisfy both client groups equally. Threat of backward integration?

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Strategic Options Breakdown

I was thinking of a way to breakdown the strategies so that we can break up the analysis job. Not really trying to be a 'master of lists'.

I think temporal is the most interesting with Google:

i) 1st order - Porter and competitive behaviours. Direct resources and constraints.
ii) 2nd order - capabilities. New product development.
iii) 3+ order - market creation.

Originally I was thinking of competitive and R&C with a bit of other stuff that does not quite fit in:

a) Competitive strategies - marketplace oriented. Porter, BCG.
b) Customer focused - resources and capability models. Based on 7s.
c) Everything else - which are in my quick review 2nd order things. Market creation, diversification across markets.

Google
a) would have things like partnering with Yahoo, tying customers in with adsense and analytics
b) work to realign a technical capability to marketing challenges
c) develop search engine use on phone, develop software distribution mechanism supported by embedded advertising. Development of software as a service.

Google outlines the future of searching

http://itnews.com.au/News/85040,google-outlines-possible-future-of-search.aspx

OK I did a flurry of using the work PC at lunch time ...

Google outs Microsoft and assimilates with Yahoo
http://itnews.com.au/News/84989,google-ceo-says-ready-to-move-ahead-on-yahoo-deal.aspx

Yahoo-Google opposition to the "merger": http://itnews.com.au/News/84826,opposition-mounts-to-googleyahoo-search-tieup.aspx

Google moving into data centres that use wave power (the green part of triple and sustainability credentials)
http://itnews.com.au/News/84782,google-applies-for-floating-data-centres-patent.aspx

Microsoft buying back shares - on the light on not getting Yahoo

We could also use this in our analysis http://itnews.com.au/News/85237,microsoft-plans-debt-issue-40b-share-buyback.aspx

I will see what I can turn up on this for Google