Month: October 2005

Sergey stopped by Web 2.0 earlier this month and I interviewed him for about thirty minutes. You can find it on IT Conversations. From the summary:

Sergey Brin talks about his own journey Stanford University graduate to Google co-founder. Attributing much of Google’s success to luck, he says that he just followed his interests. While being at the heart of Silicon Valley was obviously fortuitous, it was not one of Brin’s motives in choosing Stanford as a graduate school.

When asked about Yahoo CEO Terry Semel’s comment that Google is number four in the list of internet portals, Sergey wittily responds that it means that Google is an underdog. He further elaborates on this topic by saying that he would like to think more as Google as a technology leader rather than a content rich portal. Google also does not want to follow Microsoft’s “embrace and extend” philosophy to kill off smaller innovative companies.

From Cnet:

Google believes it can help OpenOffice–perhaps working to pare down the software’s memory requirements or its mammoth 80MB download size, said Chris DiBona, manager for open-source programs at the search company….”We want to hire a couple of folks to help make OpenOffice better,” DiBona said.



This is a step further than the Sun/Google alliance announced a few weeks back. Once it’s good enough, will it then get tossed onto the Google Grid, alongside, say, Earth and Talk? Why not? Even though that idea was pooh-poohed by Sergey at Web 2, I’m not convinced. Once productivity apps are as good as Office and served in some kind of neat client/server execution, well, I for one would be tempted to switch. I hate, hate, HATE working with Word and PPT on the Mac. So many clearly obvious and never addressed bugs. (Excel, so far, has been OK).

Perry, in a comment to the Google Base post, makes the astute observation that to date, Google has never really been seen as the destination or the application, more like the switchboard. A successful implementation of OO could change that….

This piece in the NYT was clearly written with Google’s open approval, and that means one thing: Google is using the Times to talk with the folks on Madison Ave – and Wall St. And I have no doubt those folks are reading – closely. Though the issues of data privacy and Google’s opaqueness are addressed, it still reads as something of a valentine. But with numbers like Google has, it’s hard to see how it wouldn’t be.

There are tidbits in here that mark new comments from Google (at least to a major media outlet) on a number of topics, from Google Base to Google’s AdWords optimization techniques to privacy. There’s also a bunch of history. From the piece:

This year, Google will sell $6.1 billion in ads, nearly double what it sold last year, according to Anthony Noto, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. That is more advertising than is sold by any newspaper chain, magazine publisher or television network. By next year, Mr. Noto said, he expects Google to have advertising revenue of $9.5 billion. That would place it fourth among American media companies in total ad sales after Viacom, the News Corporation and the Walt Disney Company, but ahead of giants including NBC Universal and Time Warner…..

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From Yahoo’s Search Blog:

Save to My Web is a simple, sociable button you can add to any and every page of your blog or website. Users click to save your content and add it directly to their stored pages on My Web 2.0. From there, the page is easy to retrieve, and easy to share with others. …

For bloggers and publishers, it’s a great way to distribute content to a larger community of connected users and make your pages instantly searchable on Yahoo! Just copy and paste this code into your blog templates anywhere and everywhere you want the button to appear on your pages.

Note this: “it’s a great way to… make your pages instantly searchable on Yahoo!” I think this is a neat tool, but I don’t plan to put it on my site. Why? Well, it’s too…focused on one place. I dunno, but I want something else. Something non-denominational. Clearly Yahoo is a major player, and that alone creates weather but….it feels like playing favorites. I guess that’s just me. What do you all think?