Copacetic

Robert Cringely suggests Google will bid in the next US spectrum auction in order to offer a completely free, add supported mobile network.

Like Gmail, Google can sell a higher-end product probably minus the ads. People might find they actually LIKE the ads if Google does its job really well and isn’t too intrusive. The ultimate result, of course, is near-total Google dominance of the mobile ad space and — this is REALLY big — transferring some significant portion of the market caps of all those mobile operators right onto Google’s hips. Thanks to consumer parsimony and telephone number portability, Google over the course of a couple years would become the dominant U.S. mobile operator. And no matter what handset or protocol those customers use, the ads will be there and Google will be raking in the dough.

Googles share price rockets on the back of its Open handset Alliance annoucement. A whopping $734.

What is the Open handset Alliance? They say it best,

Welcome to the Open Handset Allianceâ„¢, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies who have come together to accelerate innovation in mobile and offer consumers a richer, less expensive, and better mobile experience. Together we have developed Androidâ„¢, the first complete, open, and free mobile platform.

I think it was Scott McNealy who said ‘Those who can’t compete, consort” when DEC, HP, Siemens, IBM and a host of others created the OSF to head Sun of at the pass in the late 80’s and early 90’s.  Well its the same old song with Google’s annoucement of its OpenSocial initiative. Suddenly its the world against Facebook.

Now, I’m no “according to Hoyle” Facebook defender but you have to smell a rat when the least open company in the world suddenly make a play for sharing all the data in world with its users.

Absolutely,  OpenSocial is a good idea, but lets follow it with OpenPageRank, OpenSearch and OpenGoogleDatabase.

Googles rejigging of its page rank has winners and losers. Luckily Copacetic has been a winner and we have been catapulted into the second slot on a search for “copacetic”. We used to snuggle just below the fold behind all the dictionary entries for Copacetic.

Yes, I am a sad page rank measuring sap :-)  I expect to sink back into the void next week, so lets drink a beer and enjoy our day in the sun.

The Devils Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce is available on Google Books. Some choice quotes,

• Accordion: An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin
• Appetite: An instinct thoughtfully implanted by providence as an answer to the labour question
• Back: The part of your friend which it is your privilege to contemplate in your adversity
• Mayonnaise: One of the sauces that serve the French in place of state religion
• Misfortune: The kind of fortune that never misses
• Riot: A popular entertainment given to the military by innocent bystanders

Mike Arrington asks “What ever happened to GDrive?” especially now with SkyDrive and a host of others offering large online storage for peanuts. Well its no biggy if you stop for a second to think past the mountains of technology that pour out of Google and realise that their primary business is advertising.

No huge insight there. The difficulty arises when you try to apply Google’s standard monetization strategy to raw storage. Sure you can index it, but only for each individual user, so you soak up scads of compute power without any power law results in terms of aggregated value for all the google search users.  You could try and aggregate the results but you can bet dollars to donuts that joe user (and the EFF, FSF etc. etc.) would scream blue bloody murder about infringement of privacy, and they’d be right.

The other way Google normally makes money out of content is to stick a stream of adverts alongside but that won’t fly with remote storage because 99% of the consuming applications don’t have a mechanism to consume or display that ad stream (’cos guess who the vendor is?).

So now we have the rub, if your turn on GDrive you immediately have to allocate a gazillon gigabytes of storage for every tyre kicker in the northern hemisphere to try out the service, which ain’t small potatoes even for an outfit with a grid the size of Googles (can you say grid envy? :-)).  Plus all the bandwidth in both directions (virtual storage takes bites in both directions, especially that bad boy webdav) and not a dollar  of advertising revenue to be had. No wonder they  said “woah there cowboy”.

Instead there is a tentative dip in the water for Google Docs and Google Web Albums.  But you have to pay which kinda breaks the free for consumers model, That model has been at the heart of everything Google does (and that free model breaks poor Microsoft’s heart a little everyday so they must doing air punches all over Seattle).

Its seem clear that Google sees the way out of this conundrum by keeping you inside the Google World (Gmail, GDocs, GReader) where they can continue to face paint your browser with advertising.  Unfortunately doing anything other than the daily flyer in GDocs is like pulling your own teeth out with a pliers which means its back to Microsoft Office for that quarterly results report.

So expect the burgeoning pay-to-play storage community to make hay while the sun shines especially with Amazon stepping up to fill the infrastructure gap.

Beaten out of a market by a book vendor, maybe those Google techies ain’t so smart after all

And Microsoft,  500MB of storage? You must be havin’ a laff…

 TechCrunch reports that Zimbra will deliver a desktop client for the software suite allowing offline functionality. Expect to see the world and his wife “getting over” webside only services in the coming months. As Microsoft is moving all its stuff onto the Web I expect Google, Yahoo and friends will be marshalling their forces for an assault on the desktop. One of their invasion routes will be the IE and Firefox plugin architectures.

I want an option in Google that allows me to say  ”never bring me to this site again”. The ideal purpose is to avoid those pay for sites which hook on a useful looking domain name and then fill the site with spurious adverts. If I can eliminate those sites from my search them I can give other sites a chance to make it into my search. And lets be clear about this, this is not a per search elimination, I never want to see these sites ever again.

Think of it as an inverted Customised Search Engine.

Silicon Republic reports that Trinity College is to adopt Gmail for Domains (premier or standard ? nobody says in the article) as the default email account for all students. That’s a pretty big Gmail for Apps deployment, I would guess they will need the premier edition to allow integration with their student registration process.

Trinity plans to give every member of the Student body a tcd.ie email account for life, which is pretty cool. I also note nosing around the Google Apps for Domains website that under sales they have a Education version advertised.

Is that the sound of a thousand Outlook Express accounts closing I hear….

This map doesn’t reflect reality.