A lot of people like having the discussion of picturing Google as this evil, all seeing dystopian future type conglomerate.
While Google does all but admitting to be one (A monopoly with more power than politicians, buying AI and robotic companies, creating self driving cars etc.), it's still a bit far from reality.
So let's take a step back, and see what Google is. It's the biggest ad tech company in the world. Google makes money from pushing ads.
Not a content company. Not a hardware/ space/ AI company. Not a social network, email provider. Not a hosting company.
A huge ad company.
How big is it?
It's about as big as Microsoft in terms of market capacity, but earns 44% less. And Microsoft does a lot more business than just ads.
Google is almost twice as big as Facebook, but Facebook is leaner and growing like mad these days - And video monetising is yet to come.
But the biggest fear of Google, being a one trick unicorn (I refuse to call Google a pony), is being disrupted. Because people are aching to disrupt them.
So Google is not just trying to take over the world. It MUST do that in order to survive. It needs another meaningful business. Something that IBM, Apple, Microsoft and other tech giants which are here to stay have done.
Monday, February 16, 2015
Sunday, February 1, 2015
The Cloud Will Be Disrupted.
The cloud is where it's all at.. A centralised, managed, virtual place, where all the data and logic go. It's comfortable. It's better than in house IT. It's safer than keeping your docs on your PC.
For my 100th blog post, I would like to make a careful prediction about the future of applications.
Like traditional IT before, the cloud also has its drawbacks. The biggest one: It's not really free, and it's not really yours.
The docs you put on Google, mails you send via your free provider, images you post on Facebook, files you put on dropbox - Unless you start paying a monthly tax for these conglomerates, is theirs to use, and sometimes delete.
Some of the big companies built an eco system (Google, Facebook, but also airBNB, Uber and a lot of the shared economy companies), which gets a lot of the population to be dependent on them for their monthly pay check.
Some of these companies have enough cash and political power to bend governments.
The shared economy is best for the customer, however it puts a lot of power in the hands of too few companies. Imagine that all taxi drivers at the states belong to Uber.
Part of the fear of societies and companies from bitcoin is not the currency itself, but the democratic, P2P model of its application - A distributed application, in which logic, as well as data, could be shared by every user, not just by the service provider - Because every user is, essentially, a service provider.
Imagine an airBNB service hosted by every airBNB user, containing all the users in his country - Without the need to pay commission to the airBNB. Or a 'floating' Uber like service, where drivers and customers connect and bid directly.
This will get the prices even lower, and give more to the specific service provider, rather than cut a fat commission to an already fat company.
The infrastructure is already there - In my opinion, we will start see those applications during the coming years. Like P2P shook the media world, decentralised applications will shake and disrupt the cloud.
For my 100th blog post, I would like to make a careful prediction about the future of applications.
Like traditional IT before, the cloud also has its drawbacks. The biggest one: It's not really free, and it's not really yours.
The docs you put on Google, mails you send via your free provider, images you post on Facebook, files you put on dropbox - Unless you start paying a monthly tax for these conglomerates, is theirs to use, and sometimes delete.
Some of the big companies built an eco system (Google, Facebook, but also airBNB, Uber and a lot of the shared economy companies), which gets a lot of the population to be dependent on them for their monthly pay check.
Some of these companies have enough cash and political power to bend governments.
The shared economy is best for the customer, however it puts a lot of power in the hands of too few companies. Imagine that all taxi drivers at the states belong to Uber.
Part of the fear of societies and companies from bitcoin is not the currency itself, but the democratic, P2P model of its application - A distributed application, in which logic, as well as data, could be shared by every user, not just by the service provider - Because every user is, essentially, a service provider.
Imagine an airBNB service hosted by every airBNB user, containing all the users in his country - Without the need to pay commission to the airBNB. Or a 'floating' Uber like service, where drivers and customers connect and bid directly.
This will get the prices even lower, and give more to the specific service provider, rather than cut a fat commission to an already fat company.
The infrastructure is already there - In my opinion, we will start see those applications during the coming years. Like P2P shook the media world, decentralised applications will shake and disrupt the cloud.
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