Tag: Politics

Faith in Google?

Horace Dediu writing about Google’s public facing image and purpose.

The representation is one of a research laboratory succeeding against difficult problems. Very similar to a successful academic or industrial laboratory sustained by grants from a benevolent (but messy) organization. Google becomes the embodiment of “big science” and “the world’s laboratory” unfettered by politics and unsoiled by commercial interests.

But if Google has no commercial interest, if profit is beneath them as this article suggest, then how will Google meet it’s fiduciary responsibility?

The answer seems to be diversification, even the creation of a conglomerate. In other words, the answer seems to be that if enough great technology is developed or acquired, then a business model will appear (think about it as a probability problem) and the vulnerability of revenue sources is managed. Clever? Convenient? We’ll see.

Horace’s premise is that Google may be trying multiple and varied experiments and expecting, that given enough data and analysis of these experiments, one or several successful business models will emerge. Horace sees problems with this approach.

…The deeper problem is in us knowing their intentions. The absence of a purpose rooted in profit makes Google resistant to analysis. There might be a purpose, known only to the founders, but it’s one that is potentially naive, amoral or too abstract to be useful. Shareholders are aware of this and have agreed to entrust control to only three individuals. The purpose of the organization is in their hands alone and reflects their priorities. Bearing in mind that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, they must be brave indeed.

I don't agree with Horace here. I think Google's purpose is quite clear. Everything they have done since search -- Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Android OS, and more recently Google+ -- is geared toward data collection and data analytics

But …

The trouble lies in that organization also having de-facto control over the online (and hence increasingly offline) lives of more than one billion people. Users, but not customers, of a company whose purpose is undefined.

U.S Out of Vermont

Wagner described to me what had happened when Hurricane Irene hit Hancock in 2011. The White River rose, swept away entire homes, and disinterred the corpses in nearby cemeteries. A wall of water out of the mountains shredded Route 100, leaving 20-foot canyons, isolating the village. National Guard helicopters were slow to arrive. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was nowhere to be seen. The residents held potluck dinners and planning sessions by candlelight, deputized a leadership, heaved pebbles and gravel in backhoes to begin the repair of the roads—they had no permits to do so—and sent emissaries on foot to outlier settlements, checking on the old and the infirm. Rick Gottesman, who lives with Kathleen Byrne at her inn and who told me he was a “quiet secessionist,” wrote about Irene in an e-mail:

“There was palpable pride in the town and its people and a distinct we-ain’t-waitin’-for-no-gubmint attitude. With rivers bursting with water, forests full of firewood, abundant gardens and most of all each other, we could have easily continued for several more weeks and longer.”
Christopher Ketcham writing in The American Prospect

Bain Capital SEC Disclosure: Obama, out of better things to say, calls Romney a liar or a felon

>How do we support living standards for ordinary workers in a world where Chinese and Indian workers are bidding to do the same jobs at a fraction of the pay? That’s the question that haunts politics throughout the developed world.

That’s the question I asked myself during the massive layoffs in the 1990s at the New Jersey research labs. What are those engineers like myself doing today (besides IT)?