November 30, 2005
-
Google as Dominant Force
Who’s Afraid of Google? Everyone.
By Kevin Kelleher
It seems no one is safe: Google is doing Wi-Fi; Google is searching inside books; Google has a plan for ecommerce.
Of course, Google has always wanted to be more than a search engine. Even in the early days, its ultimate goal was extravagant: to organize the world’s information. High-minded as that sounds, Google’s ever-expanding agenda has put it on a collision course with nearly every company in the information technology industry: Amazon.com, Comcast, eBay, Yahoo!, even Microsoft.
In less than a decade, Google has gone from guerrilla startup to 800-pound gorilla. In some ways, the company is a gentle giant. Whereas Microsoft infamously smothered new and open standards, Google is famous for supporting them. And the firm is softening its image, launching a philanthropic arm, Google.org, with nearly $1 billion earmarked for social causes. But that doesn’t reduce the fear factor, and Google knows it. Omid Kordestani, the company’s global sales guru, said at a recent conference, “We’re trying to find ways so we are not viewed as a gorilla.” Given its outsize ambitions, that’s one search Google might not be able to handle.
Is the sky falling? That’s how it looks to panicked tech companies across the Valley as they contend with Google’s ever-expanding power and ambition.
VIDEO
Today, Google Video is a motley mix: clips of monkeys performing karate and robot dogs attacking iguanas. Tomorrow? No one knows, but everyone is worried.
Who’s threatened: Comcast and other cable providers, Yahoo!, TV networks that still shun the Net
Signs of panic: Comcast wants to be the Google of television. Yahoo! bristles at any mention of Google Video. Networks were stunned to find Google compiling a database of their programs.
Reality check: Google Video is up and running. The question is, How much content can it attract – or pay for – to fill the database. Watch for a strategic acquisition, even something big. TiVo?
CLASSIFIEDS
When secrecy-obsessed Google let news of “Google Base” slip, it looked like an aggressive entrée into online classifieds. The test service can search ads like used-car and personals listings, which would mesh with Google Local and might even kick-start Orkut, Google’s social network.
Who’s threatened: craigslist, eBay, Monster, Tribe.net
Signs of panic: Within hours of the Base bombshell, eBay’s market value dropped by almost $2 billion. And even before that, the classified sites were nervous. CareerBuilder and others fretted about letting Google host their feeds.
Reality check: This may be an extension of Froogle rather than a stand-alone product. But it could expand to everything from travel to eBay-like offerings.
TELECOM
Free Wi-Fi in San Francisco, instant-messaging software, a widely anticipated VoIP foray – Google’s telecom initiatives seem designed to make life radically easier for users.
Who’s threatened: Comcast, SBC, Verizon, Vonage, what’s left of AOL
Signs of panic: Surprisingly few so far, partially because Google says it has no plans to offer Wi-Fi beyond San Francisco. Still, Comcast coined the word Comcastic – is that its answer to Googlicious?
Reality check: Something’s clearly afoot, and it could be big. With great power comes great regulation – so Google recently opened a DC lobbying shop to combat “centralized control by network operators.”
OPERATING SYSTEMS
If anyone can fulfill the dream of turning the Internet into the operating system, it’s Google. If the company chooses to develop an OS, the move will cement Google’s other initiatives into a powerful whole.
Who’s threatened: Apple, Microsoft
Signs of panic: When one of Microsoft’s key operating system engineers defected to Google last year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer threw a chair across an office and vowed to kill Google.
Reality check: The migration of applications from PCs to the Net is already happening – and it’s key to Google’s future. But the likelihood of a Google OS depends on what Microsoft accomplishes with its new OS, Vista.
PRINT
What if a search engine trolled not just every page on the Web, but every page in every book? Amazon.com tried it first, then Google said it would “make the full text of all the world’s books searchable by anyone.”
Who’s threatened: Amazon, Microsoft, book publishers
Signs of panic: Against the interests of a legion of obscure writers, the Authors Guild sued Google. The Association of American Publishers, with more to fear, did the same. Microsoft and Yahoo! have joined a group that’s creating its own book search service.
Reality check: Making every book searchable sends a clear signal that Google has the brawn to organize the world’s information. But a vicious backlash could drown out that message.
PRODUCTIVITY PROGRAMS
Google joined with Sun Microsystems in October to jointly promote and distribute apps like the Google Toolbar and Sun’s free OpenOffice software. Wider distribution of the toolbar, Google’s most potent Trojan horse, gives the search engine access to a world of desktops.
Who’s threatened: Apple, Corel, Microsoft
Signs of panic: Microsoft launched its own toolbar and protested the decision of the Massachusetts Information Technology Department to dump Office for open source alternatives.
Reality check: It may be a fiendishly clever way to attack one of Microsoft’s highest-margin products, but this tactic can’t be a top priority. Google Toolbar will thrive without Sun.
ECOMMERCE
Froogle threatens no one yet. But what if, as the development of Google Wallet suggests, Google handled your every online transaction? The potential revenue from Google’s cut of each purchase would make AdSense look like AdCents.
Who’s threatened: Amazon, Buy.com, eBay
Signs of panic: After reports speculated that Google might take on PayPal, eBay said it would pay up to $4.1 billion for VoIP rebel Skype. Wall Street’s read: With PayPal under fire, eBay needed a new growth area.
Reality check: Rather than take on PayPal directly, the company may start with something less ambitious, like handling payments for premium video content. But after that? Watch out
Children and Behavior
Chip Wass
November 27, 2005
The Nation
Kids Gone Wild
By JUDITH WARNER
CHILDREN should be seen and not heard” may be due for a comeback. After decades of indulgence, American society seems to have reached some kind of tipping point, as far as tolerance for wild and woolly kid behavior is concerned.
Last month, an Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans said they believed that people are ruder now than they were 20 or 30 years ago, and that children are among the worst offenders. (As annoyances, they tied with obnoxious cellphone users.)
The conservative child psychologist John Rosemond recently denounced in his syndicated column the increasing presence of “disruptive urchins” who “obviously have yet to have been taught the basic rudiments of public behavior,” as he related the wretched experience of dining in a four-star restaurant in the company of one child roller skating around his table and another watching a movie on a portable DVD player.
In 2002, only 9 percent of adults were able to say that the children they saw in public were “respectful toward adults,” according to surveys done then by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan and nonprofit public opinion research group. In 2004, more than one in three teachers told Public Agenda pollsters they had seriously considered leaving their profession or knew a colleague who had left because of “intolerable” student behavior.
Even Madonna – her “Papa Don’t Preach” years long past – has joined the throng, proclaiming herself a proud “disciplinarian” in a recent issue of the British magazine Harpers & Queen and bragging that, as a mom, she takes a tough line on homework, tidiness and chores: “If you leave your clothes on the floor, they’re gone when you come home.”
Jo Frost, ABC’s superstar “Supernanny,” would be proud.
Whether children are actually any worse behaved now than they ever have been before is, of course, debatable. Children have always been considered, basically, savages. The question, from the late 17th century onwards, has been whether they come by it naturally or are shaped by the brutality of society.
But what seems to have changed recently, according to childrearing experts, is parental behavior – particularly among the most status-conscious and ambitious – along with the kinds of behavior parents expect from their kids. The pressure to do well is up. The demand to do good is down, way down, particularly if it’s the kind of do-gooding that doesn’t show up on a college application.
Once upon a time, parenting was largely about training children to take their proper place in their community, which, in large measure, meant learning to play by the rules and cooperate, said Alvin Rosenfeld, a child psychiatrist and co-author, with Nicole Wise, of “The OverScheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyperparenting Trap.”
“There was a time when there was a certain code of conduct by which you viewed the character of a person,” he said, “and you needed that code of conduct to have your place in the community.”
Rude behavior, particularly toward adults, was something for which children had to be chastised, even punished. That has also now changed, said Dan Kindlon, a Harvard University child psychologist and author of “Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age.”
Most parents, Dr. Kindlon said, would like their children to be polite, considerate and well behaved. But they’re too tired, worn down by work and personally needy to take up the task of teaching them proper behavior at home.
“We use kids like Prozac,” he said. “People don’t necessarily feel great about their spouse or their job but the kids are the bright spot in their day. They don’t want to muck up that one moment by getting yelled at. They don’t want to hurt. They don’t want to feel bad. They want to get satisfaction from their kids. They’re so precious to us – maybe more than to any generation previously. What gets thrown out the window is limits. It’s a lot easier to pick their towel up off the floor than to get them away from the PlayStation to do it.”
Parenting today is also largely about training children to compete – in school and on the soccer field – and the kinds of attributes they need to be competitive are precisely those that help break down society’s civility.
Parents who want their children to succeed more than anything, Dr. Kindlon said, teach them to value and prioritize achievement above all else – including other people.
“We’re insane about achievement,” he said. “Schoolwork is up 50 percent since 1981, and we’re so obsessed with our kids getting into the right school, getting the right grades, we let a lot of things slide. Kids don’t do chores at home anymore because there isn’t time.”
And other adults, even those who should have authority, are afraid to get involved. “Nobody feels entitled to discipline other people’s kids anymore,” Dr. Kindlon said. “They don’t feel they have the right if they see a kid doing something wrong to step in.”
Educators feel helpless, too: Nearly 8 in 10 teachers, according to the 2004 Public Agenda report, said their students were quick to remind them that they had rights or that their parents could sue if they were too harshly disciplined. More than half said they ended up being soft on discipline “because they can’t count on parents or schools to support them.”
And that, Dr. Rosenfeld said, strikes at the heart of the problem. “Parents are out of control,” he said. “We always want to blame the kids, but if there’s something wrong with their incivility, it’s the way their parents model for them.”
There’s also the chance, said Wendy Mogel, a clinical psychologist whose 2001 book, “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee,” has earned her a cult following, that when children are rude, obnoxious and outrageously behaved, they’re trying to tell parents something – something they’ve got to shout in order for them to hear.
“These kids are so extremely stressed from the academic load they’re carrying and how cloistered they are and how they have to live under the watchful eye of their parents,” Dr. Mogel said. “They have no kid space.”
Paradoxically, she said, parental over-involvement in their children’s lives today often hides a very basic kind of indifference to their children’s real need, simply to be kids. “There are all these blurry boundaries,” she said. “They need to do fifth-grade-level math in third grade and have every pleasure and indulgence of adulthood in childhood and they act like kids and we get mad.”
If stress and strain, self-centeredness and competition are the pathogens underlying the rash of rudeness perceived to be endemic among children in America today, then the cure, some experts said, has to be systemic and not topical. Stop blaming the children, they said. Stop focusing on the surface level of behavior and start curing instead the social, educational and parental ills that feed it.
This may mean less “quality” time with children and more time getting them to do things they don’t want to do, like sitting for meals, making polite conversation and – Madonna was right – picking their clothes up off the floor.
Judith Warner is the author, most recently, of “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety.” She is also the host of “The Judith Warner Show” on XM satellite radio.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
