Pattern Finder

Follow the Money: Google vs. Belgium

Today's New York Times article, "Google Said to Violate Copyright Laws," notes,

A Brussels court ruled Tuesday that Google had violated copyright laws by publishing links to articles from Belgian newspapers without permission. Legal experts said the case could have broad implications in Europe for the news indexes provided by search engines.

It goes on to say,

'It could set up a chain reaction, especially in European countries, where the authors’ rights are stronger,' said Pamela Samuelson, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Policy. 'If a Belgian court causes Google to change its ways, by preventing links from happening or forcing it to pay, other countries and other newspapers and other entities that have put things on the Web could say "me too."'

Where to draw the line on copyright has been around for a long time. A decade ago, when I was product manager at a now-defunct content portal, Amulet, we worried about being sued for storing publicly accessible content on our servers. (We cached it locally for better performance.) There was even talk at the time that storing content on proxy servers was illegal, although that issue seems to have been forgotten over the years.

Another Chapter in the Move to Online

As Peter O'Kelly noted in his blog a week ago, Intelligent Enterprise Magazine has ceased publication of its paper version -- now it will live only online, at www.intelligententerprise.com. I presented at an Intelligent Enterprise-sponsored summit in Norwalk, CT, back in October 2005, where I talked about web analytics. Although turnout was solid, it was clear the magazine was struggling to find its way amidst changes in the magazine business as well as changes in the technology market.

This "online only" mode is starting to become more prevalent. Cambridge SoundWorks, an audio video retailer, recently announced it was "closing most of our retail locations," and would focus on direct sales over the Internet.

Cisco Back in Acquisition Mode

According to The New York Times, Cisco is back into its serious acquistion mode of several years back. At its height during the dot.com boom, Cisco was buying a company a week, and had a swat team that could make the switch in a day. By the end of the day, the new employees would have Cisco-supplied PCs, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and business cards, as well as all the supporting paraphernalia (HR policies, IT policies, etc.).

Its latest acquisition (from an AP story filed at 4:58 today) is Five Across, a social networking company.

Google: Talking the SaaS Talk, But Not Walking the Walk

Dave Girouard, Google's Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Solutions, was in Boston recently promoting the idea that the wave of the future is Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, most notably Google's solutions. According to an article in NetworkWorld, Girouard talked about how IT departments need to focus on delivering value add for the business, rather than get bogged down in the logistics of security, adding features, and so on. Treating IT as a utility, similar to the way we treat electricity in the U.S., is the way to go.

A laudable goal, and one that I think we'll eventually get to, but one that is still years away. If you do study the history of the electricity infrastructure within the U.S., it's striking how long it took to change into the silent service we use today. First, we had to resolve the battle of AC versus DC power. Then companies bolted electricity onto the water wheel technology already in place: a water wheel delivering torque to a system of rods, pulleys, and gears. Remove the water wheel, put in an electric motor, but keep the pulleys. It was decades before it dawned on manufacturing plants that the real power of electricity was to put the engine where you needed it, rather than at the entrance to the building.

The fact that we're still at the pulley and gear stage is bolstered by Google's own difficulties at delivering this pure, instant on, magic cloud. A later article in Network World entitled, "Bugs in Blogger prompt user complaints," notes:

Users contacted in recent days via e-mail report a variety of problems, including the disappearance of blog entries, an inability to post comments, failed migrations to the new service, kinks with the RSS feature and unresponsiveness by Google to support requests.

Does any enterprise really want to trust its mission critical systems to this level of service? I don't think so. Furthermore, this is not a blip. When Google rolled out its new free web analytics service, Google Analytics, it was overwhelmed by demand, something it could have foreseen. The paying customers who had come over with the acquisition of Urchin basically had sluggish service for weeks while Google bolstered its back end infrastructure.

Due to Google's current market cap and darling status, Google's pronouncements get covered. Yet enterprises need to look beyond the talk and check out the walk, which at the moment is wobbly.