All Things Digital

QOTD

While Google is a play on googol, too is a play on the much smaller number–two. It also means “in addition,” as this blog reflects my life outside of work.”

– Google co-founder Sergey Brin explains the name of his new blog, “too,” which also means “to an excessive degree”–as in “Do you think the name I’ve chosen for my blog is a little too precious and saccharine?”

Now that Google (GOOG) has demonstrated that you can, in fact, make money without doing evil, it’s apparently willing to admit you can make even more without lending much credence to silly informal corporate mottos. Google’s moral relativism in quotations below.

2008

‘Don’t be evil’ is misunderstood. We don’t have an ‘Evilmeter’ we can sort of apply–you know–what is good and what is evil. … The rule allows for conversation. I thought when I joined the company this was crap… it must be a joke. I was sitting in a room in [the] first six months… talking about some advertising… and someone said that it is evil. It stopped the product. It’s a cultural rule, a way of forcing the conversation especially in areas that are ambiguous.”

–Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt, June 11, 2008

It really wasn’t like an elected, ordained motto. I think that ‘Don’t Be Evil’ is a very easy thing to point at when you see Google doing something that you personally don’t like; it’s a very easy thing to point out, so it does get targeted a lot.”

–Google VP Marissa Mayer, April 15, 2008

2006

Many, if not most, of you here know that one of Google’s corporate mantras is “Don’t be evil.” Some of our critics–and even a few of our friends–think that phrase arrogant, or naïve or both. It’s not. It’s an admonition that reminds us to consider the moral and ethical implications of every single business decision we make.”

–Google VP of Global Communications and Public Affairs Elliot Schrage, Feb. 15, 2006

We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil.”

–-Google CEO Eric Schmidt on the company’s decision to offer a censored version of its search services in China, Jan. 30, 2006

2005

I think it’s much better than Be Good or something. When you are making decisions, it causes you to think. I think that’s good.”

–Google co-founder Larry Page, “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture,” 2005

2002

Evil is what Sergey says is evil.”

–-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, December 2002

QUOTED

I’m pretty proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish in China. Google has a far superior track record than other Internet or Internet search companies in China.”

–Google co-founder Sergey Brin adjusts the company’s informal corporate motto “Don’t Be Evil” to “Don’t be AS evil” for the Chinese market.

The Internet has evolved from open standards, having a diversity of companies. And when you start to have companies that control the operating system, control the browsers, they really tie up the top Web sites, and can be used to manipulate stuff in various ways. I think that’s unnerving.”

That’s what Google co-founder Sergey Brin had to say about Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo. Apparently he doesn’t see the Web as an operating system. Or the irony of leveling such accusations at Microsoft when the Web today is driven in large part by “made-for-Google-AdSense” online ad-supported business models and Google is the search market’s undisputed master.

(Googlebot illustration by Tyler Jordan, eVisibility Insider)

According to last year’s safely-looking-ahead-to-the-year-to-come lists, 2007 was to be “a year of hyperdisruption for the technology industry”; it was to be “a year of significant developments” and “a year of evolution”; it was to be “a year of invention and innovation,” “a year of experimentation” and “a year of slow, but significant, change”; it was to be “a year of carnage,” but it was also to be “a year of great happiness and multiple blessings.” Above all, 2007 was to be “a busy year for technology.”

Which, as you’ll see below (and in our companion video), is pretty much how it turned out. What follows is Digital Daily’s abridged guide to the year in tech news–a fond reminiscence of what was, and our First Annual Year-End List For Year-End List Haters.

1. Yahoo Shareholders Reject Plan to Tie Executive Compensation to Company’s Crappy Performance
   Well, what do you know: Yahoo’s annual shareholder meeting didn’t conclude with CEO Terry Semel’s head piked on the exclamation point of the Yahoo sign outside company headquarters.

2. I Know It Was You, Fredo. You Broke My Heart. You Broke My Heart!
   Apparently, Fred Anderson is the “Fredo” of the Apple options backdating family.

3. We’ve Asked John Williams to Do a Special Performance of the Theme From “The Poseidon Adventure” for Our Q4 Results
   Who’s programming Microsoft’s on-hold music, Apple’s Phil Schiller? Waiting for the company’s third-quarter earnings call to begin yesterday, those listening in were treated to an instrumental piano version of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” From “Titanic,” the disaster movie.

4. I’m Proud to Say Our New “Soylent Green” iPod Is Made of 100% Biodegradable Greenpeace Activists!
   If you’re going to try to smear Apple for reckless environmental practices, you best have some hard epidemiological and toxicological data on hand, because goofy Photoshop treatments of the company’s marketing materials just can’t stand up to a blow from the Apple PR machine.

5. And Online Display Impressions Soared as More Americans Checked Their AOL Accounts for Old Times’ Sake
   To hear tell from Time Warner executives, the company’s better-than-expected earnings for the first quarter owed quite a bit to gains in online-advertising market share by its AOL Internet division.

6. Web 2.0 Audience in Mirror May Be Smaller Than It Appears
   How ironic is it that Web 2.0–the “participatory Web”–has far fewer participants than its architects would have us believe?

7. And for My Next Trick, I’ll Turn Myself Into a Complete Jackass
   If you’re going to demand that YouTube remove a video to which you object under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s probably wise to make sure that you actually understand the DMCA.

8. War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength. DRM Is DCE.
   You can’t put frosting on manure, but HBO’s Chief Technology Officer Bob Zitter isn’t above trying.

9. We’re Naming It the Motorola STNKR, After Our Q1 Earnings …
   Carl Icahn was right. Motorola really is desperate for a new product. How else to explain a patent the company was awarded last month for a “communication device having a scent-release feature and method thereof.”

10. The Frienemy of My Frienemy Is My Enemiend
    If Microsoft is planning an acquisition in the online marketing and advertising space, it better act fast, because if it waits much longer there won’t be anything left to acquire.

11. How Would Monsieur Ellison Like His BEA Served? Mixed in a Bucket With Oracle’s Other Acquisitions?
    Looks like we may be in for another PeopleSoft-esque takeover drama …

12. I’m Just Biding My Time Here Until I Can Quit and Study Whale Feces Full Time
    Given the chance, how would you alter the course of your career? Well, if you worked at Microsoft’s Security Response Center, you might consider taking a job as an Olympic drug tester, a gravity research subject, or a “whale-feces researcher.”

13. Much Like Energy, BS Cannot Be Created or Destroyed, It Can Only Be Changed From One Form to Another
    If Steorn’s perpetual motion effort is anything like its e-commerce venture (and by all accounts things do seem to be going that way), the only thing in its future is insolvency.

14. From Now On, We’ll Be Known as Nlsn/NtRtings
    Looks like vowels won’t be the only accoutrements to be tossed aside in the rise of Web 2.0. The venerable page view is to be abandoned as well.

15. The Defendant Stands Accused of Copyright Infringement, Breach of Contract and Misappropriation of Dumb Luck
    According to popular legend Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once kept two versions of his business card in his wallet–one with the title CEO, the other with “I’M CEO . . . BITCH.”

16. Well, Here Come YouTube’s Video ID Tools. Guess That Means Godot Will Be Here Any Minute Now
    Google’s apparently finished “educating users about copyright law” and has moved on to the far more important business of making sure not to run afoul of it.

17. Look at It This Way: Now That Yahoo’s an ‘Ecosystem,’ the EPA Can Finally Declare It a Superfund Site
    “Our financial performance is not what we would like to see long-term.” This, from Blake Jorgensen, Yahoo’s chief financial officer who, just six weeks into the job, is already well versed in the company’s fiscal truisms.

18. Gates to Google: My Lyrical Technique Will Leave Your Body Weak
    Much as Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates fancies himself untroubled by Google’s incursions into his software empire, they clearly do chafe him a bit.

19. Newest Yahoo Mail Feature: BCC Beijing
    Sure, Yahoo signed China’s “Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry,” a voluntary agreement to monitor and restrict information deemed “harmful” by Beijing, but did it have to take it quite so seriously?

20. Apple: Wham, Bam, Thank You Fanboi
    “I feel like a $200 whore.” That was one iPhone early adopter’s crass assessment of his feelings of self-worth, after Apple unexpectedly cut the price of the device by a third–just two months after it arrived at market.

21. In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing, Sergey’s California King May Be Used as a Flotation Device
    With its onboard hammocks, full-size sofas and California King beds, it’s a wonder Google’s “party plane” has room for scientific instrumentation befitting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but apparently it does.

22. Act Now and Get a Downgrade to the OS You Really Want, ABSOLUTELY FREE!
    It’s looking more and more like the pent-up demand for Windows Vista we’ve heard so much about this past year is really just pent-up demand for Windows XP.

23. Dude, I Work for Friggin Forbes Magazine. Have You Heard of It?
    The year-long guessing game is over. New York Times reporter Brad Stone has outed Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes magazine, as the author of the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, the satirical blog lampooning Apple’s iconic CEO (See? Told you it wasn’t me).

24. If Facebook’s Worth $15 Billion, Then My Stupid Idea’s Got to Be Good for $10 Mil
    Apparently the vainglory from which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to suffer is communicable and spreading rapidly throughout the social network’s developer community.

25. A Billion Here, a Billion There, and Pretty Soon You’re Talking Real Bollocks
    MySpace is worth $65 billion in the same way that Facebook is worth $15 billion–hypothetically.

26. “Apple Has Destroyed the Music Business”–Not That We Didn’t Try Our Best
    Many, many years ago, when the digital-music business consisted of little else besides Napster and the Recording Industry Association of America’s lawsuits against it, Apple proved that there was indeed a decent business to be had in selling music online for $1 per song.

27. It’s Not an Unpaid Endorsement, It’s a “Social Ad”
    Facebook’s Social Ads aren’t endorsements, they’re a “representation” of user activity.

28. Obama Announces “No Tech Policy Left Behind” Plan
    If Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s is to do the same to its tech-policy issues.

29. Sounds More Like the “Zune of Reading” to Me
    If Jeff Bezos truly hopes to create “the iPod of reading,” observers say he’s going to have to do a hell of a lot better than Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader.

30. Fiascobook
    What Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lacks in foresight, he certainly makes up for in disingenuous hair-shirt remorse.

Odd, isn’t it, that Google will award up to $30 million in prize money to anyone able to land a privately funded spacecraft on the moon, but it’s willing to pony up just $10 million to spur interest in development of its new Android platform for mobile devices. Apparently Google’s dominion over space figures higher on the list of company priorities than its dominion over the mobile market.

This morning, Google’s Open Handset Alliance released the Android Software Development Kit in concert with the Android Developer Challenge, a contest that will see Google doling out $10 million in prize money to programmers able to create workable applications for the platform.

“We’ve built some interesting applications for Android but the best applications are not here yet and that’s because they’re going to be written by developers,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a statement. “We’d like to reward these developers and recognize them as much as possible.”

Cash prizes will range from $25,000 to $275,000. Half of the $10 million will be awarded for entries submitted between Jan. 2 and March 3 of next year. The other $5 million will be distributed in a second round that will start after the first Android-based phones arrive at market in the second half of 2008.

Android is built on a Linux 2.6 kernel and supports multitouch interaction, which means we’ll likely be seeing quite a bit of creativity on the platform.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, not Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, is the most influential IT personality of the past quarter-century.

This according to a survey of IT professionals conducted by the Computing Technology Industry Association. Asked to list the most influential tech personalities of the last 25 years, 84% of respondents listed Gates, and 73% listed Jobs. Also appearing on the list: Dell CEO Michael Dell (53% of respondents); Linux founder Linus Torvalds (47%); Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (also 47%); Cisco CEO John Chambers (44%); Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (36%); Vint “Father of the Internet” Cerf (35%); Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (also 35%); and eBay CEO Meg Whitman (30%).

In a press conference following Google Analyst Day, company Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin confirmed Google’s plans to bid in the FCC’s upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction, but declined to discuss the mobile-phone strategy that might make use of it–apparently leaving that task to The Wall Street Journal.

According to a report in the publication today, Google will officially disclose its long-anticipated plans for Google-powered phones within the next two weeks. The devices will reportedly feature Google’s standard mobile applications (Maps, etc.) and more interestingly, a customized open-source operating system, which would allow third-party developers to build applications beyond those offered by Google. From the Journal:

The Google-powered phones are expected to wrap together several Google applications–among them, its search engine, Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail email–that have already made their way onto some mobile devices. The most radical element of the plan, though, is Google’s push to make the phones’ software ‘open’ right down to the operating system, the layer that controls applications and interacts with the hardware. That means independent software developers would get access to the tools they need to build additional phone features.

“Developers could, for instance, more easily create services that take advantage of users’ Global Positioning System location, contact lists and Web-browsing habits. They also would be able to interact with Google Maps and other Google applications. The idea is that a range of new social networking, mapping and other services would emerge, just as they have on the open, mostly unfettered Web. Google, meanwhile, could gather user data to show targeted ads to cellphone users.”

And don’t forget the mobile commerce element. Google-powered phones might even offer customers a way to pay for goods from vending machines and retailers via text message.

Anyway … The company has approached a number of handset makers and wireless operators about partnering in the effort, which it hopes to bring to market by the middle of 2008.

Previously:

• First Gphone Line Forms in New York Times Newsroom
• We Believe in One Godphone, the Handset Almighty …
• ‘We’re Not Doing a Mobile Phone’ Added to Norton Anthology of False Denials
• The Gphone: Exclusively From Sprint Nextel and Google?

As Microsoft announced that it would invest $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, valuing Mark Zuckerberg’s little Harvard project at $15 billion, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and company co-founder Sergey Brin were onstage at Google’s analyst day in Mountain View, Calif..

Coincidence? Not likely. How satisfying it must have been for Redmond to block Google’s entrée to Facebook at such a time. Didn’t seem to faze Google much though–as unaccustomed to playing the role of a runner-up as it might be. Perhaps that’s because Microsoft’s deal doesn’t appear to include search-based advertising, which could present Google with a significant opportunity in the future.

Perhaps it’s because Google feels Microsoft overpaid. Said Schmidt, “Some competitors are clearly willing to spend larger amounts of money beyond their ability to monetize.”

Or perhaps it’s because of Facebook’s “faddish nature,” which Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was pointing out just a few weeks back. After all, Zuckerburbia ain’t the only social-networking game in town. “There are plenty of companies using the notion of social community,” said Schmidt. “It is pretty obvious people will be members of multiple networks; which is why our world won’t collapse with any one network.”

Perhaps it’s time for Google to change the navigation at the foot of its search-return pages from ‘Goooooooooogle >‘ to ‘Moooooooooola >.’
Shares of the company hit an all-time high of $560.70 today before dropping a bit to close at $559.98.

The reason for the spike? New comScore search-engine rankings that show Google dominating the market, with a 56.5% share and analyst speculation that the company may one day reach $100 billion in annual revenue. “Google is poised to make ‘big plays’ that could help the company reach $100 billion in revenue,” said Stephen E. Arnold, author of Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator. “Most companies neither understand Google’s capabilities nor grasp the significance of the 9-year-old company’s technology. … Google is perceived as a Web search and advertising company. This is the conventional wisdom, and it is too narrow. Search and advertising lubricate Google’s business model. The technical infrastructure and Google-proprietary technology revealed in patent applications give it a significant advantage in today’s marketplace.”

OK. But advantage enough to generate $100 billion in revenue? Sounds crazy. But then again, who ever thought shares in the company would trade at $560 or that co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page would tie for fifth place on Forbes’s annual list of the 10 richest Americans?