It used to be an article of faith that Google would compete with Microsoft by becoming the standard on the Web in the same way that Microsoft (still) dominates the desktop. As the reality draws near, the irony is that Google is slipping, in much the same way that Microsoft has done, for years.
Take privacy. Microsoft for years had a horrible reputation for protecting the privacy and security of its customers. Hotmail became a hotbed for spam, Passport was an invitation for trouble, MSN was cluttered with junk, and embarrassing security problems made it prudent to "just say no" to Microsoft.
Now Google is in the same boat. It has always been actively hostile to privacy, in any true sense. It wants to know everything about you, and share this knowledge throughout its properties. Its single-sign-on system is little different from the Microsoft .net Passport that so riled consumers over the years.
It has always had at least as much capacity for evil as Microsoft, and a slick marketing line about doing no evil offers little comfort. Did you expect them to say: "Hell yeah, we'll be evil when we want to?"
It had not yet, however, developed a reputation for deliberately or accidentally abusing its power. Until now.
When it launched Buzz, a social-network challenger to Facebook and Twitter, it made a grave error. It would automatically connect you to the people in your e-mail address book. That this might include abusive husbands (as happened with Eva Hibnick, who is filing a class-action lawsuit against the firm), or cabinet ministers and CEOs (as might be the case with many people, journalists not least among them), did not occur to Google.
As a result, its back-scrabbling came too late. I, like many others, disabled Buzz, and will never use it again. In fact, although I use Google services extensively, I am for the first time reluctant to turn over any more of my data or services to the Google cloud.
I, like many others, disabled [Google's] Buzz, and will never use it again.
Ivo Vegter, ITWeb contributor
Before Buzz, there was Wave. It was hoping to ride this all the way to the shore, but it hardly caused a ripple. This was supposed to revolutionise communication by tying all your messaging and collaboration into a single interface. Nice idea. If it worked. It suffered from the bootstrap conundrum of lacking a network effect, too much for new users to take in, and no immediate and obvious advantage over the traditional way of doing things. In short, it hasn't taken off. In my case, I ditched it because it simply refused to synchronise over a 3G connection. (Thanks, Vodacom.)
While its previous ventures were in cloud-based services - think YouTube, Picasa, Orkut - and platform software - like Chrome and Android, this has now changed.
In the US, Google has launched its own mobile handset. This reverses its original policy, when it released the Android operating system in response to Apple's actual phone. The thinking then was that it would own the platform, but not the hardware. This thinking is now toast. It has turned to HTC, which makes excellent Android handsets, to create a special Google phone called Nexus One. I'm sure it's great, but is hardware really any of Google's business?
It gets worse. In an attempt to get the Internet to catch up with all this idealistic cloud coolness, it is running an ultra-high-speed broadband trial in the US. It is laying cables. Never mind gadgets, what is Google doing in the consumer infrastructure business, besides knocking almost $100 off a share price that just seemed to be on the rise again in 2009? Is it in cloud cuckoo land?
This is all very reminiscent of Microsoft, which has spent the decade since the dot-com boom trying out one business after another - gaming consoles, server software, consumer devices, online services, business applications - only for its share price to stagnate. Worse, the vast majority of its operating profit stubbornly comes from the cash cows of yesteryear, Windows and Office. Outside these, only the server division makes a token contribution. The rest is junk.
Microsoft has spent 10 years buying or creating new business divisions in the hope of finding a seed - any seed - for future growth. It has found nothing but pain, and now bears the scars of its many failed experiments and public mistakes. To make matters worse, it got to play the pi~nata to regulators the world over.
In short, Microsoft is adrift without a rudder.
All of which sounds very much like a description of Google, right now, except that it has hardly yet been blooded in this kind of war.
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