Today’s Journal runs a piece on Google and the content biz. It’s behind the wall, but some good stuff:
… the farther Google ventures beyond the Web, the tougher the road gets — as its dealings with some big TV companies show….
…Google “didn’t show proper respect for us as potential partners,” says Larry Kramer, president of digital media at CBS. “We’re not just going to give this away for free.”…
… there are growing signs that Google is finished with the easy stuff. Its attempts to search other information — starting with books, TV and scholarly works — promise to be more costly and time-consuming than the simple Web searches that propelled its first years of growth….
…Google’s video-search quest is moving it toward possible competition with the cable-TV industry….
… Google surprised some broadcasters by telling them it was already building a digital database of their programs…. Rick Cotton, general counsel at General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal, says Google’s “stunning approach” brought talks to a halt. “This is not the way one normally does business whether you’re an old company or a young one,” he says.
…Google’s chief executive, Mr. Schmidt, calls Google’s mission a long-term one. “It will take, current estimate, 300 years to organize all of the world’s information,” he says.
Thanks to reader Scott Kidder.
As a Google investor, I appreciate their focus on building the business for the long term. But 300 years? That’s just more Eric Schmidt googlebabble.
See http://battellemedia.com/archives/001600.php
I have little sympathy for Kramer and Cotton.
300 hundreds years… just some seconds in the time of universe…
In 300 years, 1 of 2 things will have happened: (1) mankind will have finally succeeded in eliminating itself from the face of the planet; OR (2) the man-machine interface will be non-esistent and we will all be machines communicating wirelessly (telepathically) with all the knowledge of the universe on our own individual hard drives. In either case, there will be no need for Google. If past history is any indicator, Google has already peaked and will be supplanted shortly by The Next Big Thing in search technology. It’s totally ironic that Yahoo!’s search feature was licensed for so many years from other companies, and now they finally decide to build their own (MyWeb 2.0)–a bit late to the party there Jerry, David, and Terry….Search is just the “hot” area in web/tech at present, but it’s still a commodity product with low barriers to entry so not much real magic there…
I would hate to be Eric Schmidt and responsible for maintaining hype around Google and dealing with the enormous egos of the two hacker overlords.
300 years: wonder how much more information there’ll be to organize then. Problem of keeping up is as much social as technical…