Posted on 11/06/2005 5:51:08 AM PST by summer
Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer, often intimidates its competitors and suppliers. Makers of goods from diapers to DVD's must cater to its whims. But there is one company that even Wal-Mart eyes warily these days: Google, a seven-year-old business in a seemingly distant industry.
"We watch Google very closely at Wal-Mart," said Jim Breyer, a member of Wal-Mart's board.
In Google, Wal-Mart sees both a technology pioneer and the seed of a threat, said Mr. Breyer, who is also a partner in a venture capital firm. The worry is that by making information available everywhere, Google might soon be able to tell Wal-Mart shoppers if better bargains are available nearby.
Wal-Mart is scarcely alone in its concern. As Google increasingly becomes the starting point for finding information and buying products and services, companies that even a year ago did not see themselves as competing with Google are beginning to view the company with some angst - mixed with admiration.
Google's recent moves have stirred concern in industries from book publishing to telecommunications. Businesses already feeling the Google effect include advertising, software and the news media. Apart from retailing, Google's disruptive presence may soon be felt in real estate and auto sales...
...Such advances, predicts Esther Dyson, a technology consultant, will bring "a huge reduction in inefficiency everywhere." That, in turn, would be an unsettling force for all sorts of industries and workers. But it would also reward consumers with lower prices and open up opportunities for new companies.
Google, then, may turn out to have a more far-reaching impact than earlier Web winners like Amazon and eBay. "Google is the realization of everything that we thought the Internet was going to be about but really wasn't until Google," said David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
no fan of google
will not use any of their products
Precisely why the NYT uses it instead of something neutral like, "Uses their considerable size to leverage the best prices from their suppliers to benefit their customers and stock holders"
If they said something like that though, they wouldn't be the New York Times.
Only if they use taxpayer funded, ACLU protected library computers.
They also lack the pernicious anti-corporatist Reno Justice Dept, who waged all out war on Microsoft because they succeeded in business against Clinton donors.
That will come. If they "disrupt" conventional commerce by being successful, they will become a target.
Whenever I am buying anything for over a hundred bucks, I start out at ebay. I review the current auctions and then go to the completed auctions and see what the item went for. Then its off to the shopping engines of which Google's service, Froogle, is just one. You can do your straight Google searches for a product, but I find the shopping sites to be more efficient and the information is formatted in such a way that makes it easier to absorb.
However, I can see the day coming where Google supplants the shopping engines. With a little fine tuning and the ability to filter out unwanted responsed easier, Google will become the last word.
Another nice thing about Gmail is the ability to use it as a POP3 server. You can simply configure outlook to pull the mail right off of it. You can do this with yahoo too, but they charge you money. With Gmail everything is free.
Economists call it "creative destruction." A new idea comes along, whole industries are put out of business, weak firms go to the wall, workers are laid off. But then new, more efficient businesses arise, and the workers go to them. It's unsettling, but it keeps us ahead of the competition, i.e., other countries that imitate our technology.
The Japanese, for instance, have been fantastic at imitating our technology and doing it even better, but they are much less adept at innovation and change.
http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm
It's a freebie and a warning; changes in gmail break it from time to time.
If you've no concern about what's on gmail it can be very handy, especially if you travel.
The day that one of them decides to do it their way is the day to dump your google shares.
LOL, then why don't they?
I still use dialup and Yahoo email is extremely slow.
"Google is the next Microsoft. They have money, momentum, products. All thy lack is the organized fear and hatred that Microsoft has inspired. And the federal anti-trust lawsuits."
Google sells a valuable service, not a buggy, half-a$$ed OS that happens to be a monopoly.
Are there less ads or any? I pay for the Mail Plus ($20/year) no ads, no Yahoo tagline at the end of your message, POP forwarding so I can use the account with Thunderbird or Outlook. Gmail has all these too, but you get ads and privacy issues.
Is it targeted advertising like g-mail, scanning the messages? I haven't noticed any spam related to message traffic.
What about storage limits? I forget what the Yahoo free account offers, something like 10 MB. Mail Plus gets you 2 GB.
And how long does it take to open? On Roadrunner or DSL, its pretty fast. Sometimes Yahoo mail servers seem to be down for several minutes.
To understand this, you need to look it as they see it. To quite a few of this mindset, economics consists of a finite pie. The only way they can continue to have their "slice", is to deny anyone else another slice, or, a part of their slice.
Logical? No...but you cannot use logic when attempting to understand the mind of a modern liberal. Their worldview is a complete departure from logic and common sense...and "limousine liberals" are the worst of them all. Most of them would sell their own mothers into slavery if they felt that was the only way to maintain their current status.
When you look at it from that context, having socialists in charge is the best possible thing for them...because they know that by "buying" them into power, they stand a very healthy chance of being "shielded" from any adverse consequences. Those things are suffered by the "little people".
Personally, those who think like that have earned, and will continue to earn my unbridled loathing and contempt. I have nothing to do with them and I go out of my way to ridicule and mock them when or if I have the misfortune to be forced by circumstance to encounter them; publically if possible. I consider them a clear and present danger to the long term survival of a constitutional republic.
Google Inc.'s two 32-year-old founders are getting ready to fly in a style that reflects their billionaire status.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page bought earlier this year a Boeing 767-200 wide-body airliner, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Not typically used as a corporate jet, the airliner carries 180 passengers, and is more than two-thirds longer and three times as heavy as most business jets.
In an interview with the newspaper, Page said the jetliner would be refurbished to hold about 50 passengers. He declined to give further details, but people familiar with the project told the Wall Street Journal that the jetliner would have a sitting area, two staterooms and a large sitting-and-dining area.
Brin and Page have a combined net worth of more than $20 billion, the newspaper said. The two founders bought the plane themselves and will use it for personal travel. There are no plans to have Google cover the costs, Page told the Journal.
__________________________________________________________________
TechWeb News
Author: Google's Patents Reveal Strategy To Beat Microsoft
By W. David Gardner
September 30, 2005
Dig deeper into Google, dig into its software and engineering patents and you’ll find a roadmap for its future, says an author and online systems specialist, who believes the patents also spell bad news for Microsoft if the tech world moves to a new Google-dominated network paradigm.
“Google really doesn’t hide things,” said Stephen E. Arnold, who has written a book on his one-year odyssey studying the search firm. “Bill Gates is basically in the same spot he had IBM in. IBM was challenged by Microsoft and IBM didn’t understand Microsoft’s business model. It’s history repeating itself.”
Arnold, author of “The Google Legacy”, said in an interview this week, that it appears that Microsoft doesn’t understand Google in much the same way that IBM didn’t understand Microsoft 20 years ago. “It will be the Googleplex from 2004 to 2020 – a network paradigm,” said Arnold. “It will be enabled by Google’s approach to innovation.”
[snip]
Another industry observer, Joe Wilcox, senior analyst at JupiterResearch, believes that Google represents a “version 2” challenge to Microsoft’s Windows dominance. “Version 1,” according to Wilcox, was the earlier threat to Microsoft’s dominance represented by Netscape’s browser.
“Windows is threatened again (by Google) and in some ways the threat is greater than before,” said Wilcox. “Google is betting on search as the next platform.” Wilcox believes there are still some big “ifs” in the future of the Google rollout – whether the search firm can execute its business plan well and what Microsoft will do to respond.
__________________________________________________________________
Only time will tell the range of Google's success, or of their failure by overextension.
I don't own any Google stock or have any stake in their venture, but I do use several of the services they currently offer and will test any new ones that interest me.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.