Are Google's Best Days Behind It?
Linked by snydeq on Mon 8th Aug 2011 22:14 UTC
Google InfoWorld's Neil McAllister questions whether slowing product development, legal woes, and rising bureaucracy will signal trying times ahead for Google. "With Google's rapid growth have come new challenges. It faces intense competition in all of its major markets, even as it enters new ones. Its newer initiatives have often struggled to reach profitability. It must answer multiple ongoing legal challenges, to say nothing of antitrust probes in the United States and Europe. Privacy advocates accuse it of running roughshod over individual rights. As a result, it's becoming more cautious and risk-averse. But worst of all, as it grows ever larger and more cumbersome, it may be losing its appeal to the highly educated, impassioned workers that power its internal knowledge economy." Note from Thom: Are Apple's Microsoft's Google's days behind it? I don't think you can call yourself a technology giant without a '[...] is dying'-article.
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_txf_
Member since:
2008-03-17

As I understand it Google have an exclusive licence to that patent. Do you think that if Apple cloned the PageRank software and patent content for it's own search engine then Google might decide to do something about it?


What can they do? At least they cannot sue for patent infringement (that is up to Stanford University). Frankly I don't think they would do anything except mock Apple for not coming up with their own search algorithm (much like the way they mocked MS for piggybacking off their own search results).

Reply Parent Score: 2

Tony Swash Member since:
2009-08-22

"As I understand it Google have an exclusive licence to that patent. Do you think that if Apple cloned the PageRank software and patent content for it's own search engine then Google might decide to do something about it?


What can they do? At least they cannot sue for patent infringement (that is up to Stanford University). Frankly I don't think they would do anything except mock Apple for not coming up with their own search algorithm (much like the way they mocked MS for piggybacking off their own search results). "

Presumably Google's relaxed attitude to sharing the core algorithms that run it's business is why they keep them so secret?

Anyway all this comment about Pagerank is just a pedantic quibble - it doesn't address the issue of Googles hypocrisy and it's cavalier attitude to other people's data, information and property.

Edited 2011-08-09 14:32 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2

Thom_Holwerda Member since:
2005-06-29

Anyway all this comment about Pagerank is just a pedantic quibble - it doesn't address the issue of Googles hypocrisy and it's cavalier attitude to other people's data, information and property.


What's hypocritical about it? You can come up with alternate universes until the troops come home, but these are the facts.

- Google has never sued anyone with patent and/or trademark infringement, has never threatened anyone to do so, and has never shown any intention to do so, let alone to squash competition.

- Apple is suing countless companies over patent and trademark infringement, has threatened to do so countless times, all to squash competition, in a coordinated efforts with the other companies in the anti-Google cartel.

Those are the facts. You can come up with " what-ifs" all you want - but when it comes to Apple, we don't have to resort to "what-ifs", and that's what bothers most of us.

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