ValleySnark

The folks at Google are trying very very hard to complete the second act of a greek tragedy. I don’t know why.  Here’s the analogy: 

Act 1:  Young smart rich white folks (who everyone wants to be) find incredible success in a Garage.  (Oedipus takes out the Sphynx.)

Act 2:  Hubris Hubris Hubris.  “Search is 90% solved” says Marissa Mayer. “It’s a party jet” says Larry. Or was is Sergei?  Or was it Rosencranz?  Meanwhile, they embark on super expensive acquisitions to cover up failed yet expensive organic attempts to grow the business.  (Base? Knol?  That Second Life knock off?)  And they screw the little people. 

Act 3:  I don’t know what act three is, but the stage is getting set. The stock is down 40%, and the vast majority of employees are deep in the red on their stock options.  The smartest people are leaving to go to Facebook or some other next big thing.  The parking lots empty out earlier each day. Is there a Lear in the future, howling in the wilderness?  Or will someone gouge their eyes out when they see that they’ve become the next Microsoft: sclerotic, anti-innovative, and clearly of a prior generation?

Everyone loves to see failure. The bigger the better. Hence the dogpile on Cuil.  Check out this article and be sure to read the comments.

The Cuil folks didn’t learn the lesson from the Segway launch.  The lesson is this: Don’t proclaim that you are going to reshape the world.  Just don’t. Even if you’re going to.  Because once you stand up and say it, everyone will be on the edge of their seat waiting for your pathetic idea to collapse into dust. 

On the other hand, if you do change the world, you can fly around in your party jet, and no one will care if you pointed at the stands before you swung the bat.

One of the really sad things that big rich tech companies do is invest tens of millions of dollars in solving problems that don’t exist.  Whether it’s Google “improving” Craig’s List and Wikipedia with Base and Know, or Microsoft with their new Sphere display, you’ve got to wonder how these things get born.

I suspect a big part is guys sitting around going “wouldn’t it be cool if . . .”  or “did you see that movie on Sci-Fi where . . . “  The budget gets approved because you can’t just give all that cash to employees, and you sure as heck aren’t going to send it to the shareholders. 

The other reason it gets approved is because in tech, no one wants to crap on “vision” because that’s not the culture.  It’s like the Emperor has no clothes when it comes to cool new ideas.

What fat, rich high tech companies really need is some kind of market mechanism that prunes out stupid ideas at the $5 million and $15 million investment marks. That’s where the venture community does it with their A rounds and B rounds.  That way, engineers and product managers have to worry about building something valuable really fast. Because they’ll get lose their job if they don’t. 

Meanwhile, some lifer at Microsoft has spent years building a feature called “send it to the dark” side.  Now, they’re trying to claim this thing is useful because of better privacy?  Give me a break.

If you’re looking for evidence that Google is a one trick pony, look no further than Know, their money making knock off of wikipedia.  I’ve been playing around with it as a writer as well as a reader. Here’s my review: it blows. 

Problem 1: Content   Sure it’s still empty, but it will populate. So the question is, populate with what?  Well, for high traffic topics like George Bush and Britney Spears, it looks like the thing to do is copy the Wikipedia entry in its entirety and past that into Knol. 

But other topics, like Islam, are being flooded with opinions. One entry is simply this: “Islam is one of the world’s newer religions, with it’s (sic) heart in the middle east (sic).”  Another entry lets us know that “the most complete way of life is found in the religion of Islam.”  A third article claims ”This article is for those people who has newly converted to Islam , and on the first-things-have-to-do’s.”  What does that mean?  With 25 entries for Islam (and more coming) I don’t see the content here as sorting itself out into something useful or meaningful.

And finally, some topics are simply commercial content. (Try Abdominoplasty for a very neutral entry from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.)

Problem 2: Bugs and User Interface  I couldn’t figure out how to get my knols published. It turns our there is some indexing bug where not all published knols will appear when you search for them. I only could see mine when I was logged in.  It’s too bad Google doesn’t have some kind of technology that can build an index of content and then allow users to find it somehow. Maybe they should partner with cuil. 

One thing they failed to copy from wikipedia is grouping by language. Search for Spain, and you’ll get answers in German.  That’s very global-village of Google, but it leaves a lot to be desired from a user perspective. 

Beyond that, the experience of writing knols leaves a lot to be desired. The site is very slow.  It has boxes without explaination, like “affiliation.”  It lets you rate your own knol. (I gave all of mine 5 stars because they were the best.)

The bottom line is that with the money, resources, and self-proclaimed brain power that Google has, you would have thought they would have done better. But they don’t know how. Despite all their claims of greatness, Google can still fail when it comes to copying even simple yet successful models.  Knol is going to end up a lot like that Craig’s List Killer, Google Base.

Google is an innovation machine. They ripped off Mapquest for Google Maps.  They reinnovated Hotmail for Gmail.  Now, they’re going after Wikipedia with Knol.  What was wrong with Wikipedia that makes Google think this is better?  Nothing of course.  They just want the money. 

Despite all the big brains in the building, I suspect that Knol will have a very hard time breaking through.  Just check out the adoption rates of Gmail and Google Maps.

But going after Wikipedia strikes me as something worse. Something, dare I say, Evil?  With free mail and maps, it was always an ad driven business.  And it’s great if they want to build better products to get my traffic. 

Wikipedia is different. It’s about community. It’s about people working together to build something very powerful and useful.  It’s volunteers spending time to make the world a better place. And it’s working. 

Why Google wants to attack that for a few bucks, I don’t know.   But if they think the George Bush entry written by Karl Rove is a way to make the world better, then I think they better change their motto.

On the theme of lame people, here’s one for the books.  Mark Vargas, who apparently hates trees and loves the environment, covered his yard with 1000 square feet of solar panels.   Then, he sued his neighbors for having trees.   

Check out the picture. He doesn’t look like the smartest guy around. He’s grabbing himself like Michael Jackson for the camera.  Meanwhile, the new panels are practically under the trees. 

Dummy wonders if new solar panels like the shade

This reveals a massive inter-generational divide regarding what’s best for the environment. Yes, they drive a Prius. Yes, they planted trees.  That’s what ’60s style environmentalists would have us all do.  But this is the land of tech.  We use silicon, not carbon-based life forms, to solve our problems.  So when you’re envisioning a green future, Silicon Valley-style, be sure you don’t picture any plant life as part of it.

Good news for older hippies:  Champion of the Nanny-State, Joe Simitian, has changed the law so that the trees win.

TechCrunch published an interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Since Google is responsible for at least 35% of all snark in the valley, I thought it would be worth pointing out a few things.
Look at what he reveals about their HR strategy. They don’t “value experience very much” and they like to hire people who like to work with other people. That’s great for a college like environment where everyone hangs out and talks about what would be cooler than cool. But is it good for innovation?

He goes on to say that “all the interesting things have been built by two people.” Google has more than 5000 people in R+D. That would be 2500 two person teams to build cool stuff. What cool stuff have they launched in the last 5 years?

Instead of building stuff, they’re buying it. Blue Lithium, Begun.ru, YouTube, Digg. If the strategy is to acquire the great things that two person teams are building, why spend $75 million a month on R+D?

He says they need to solve the problem of making larger teams effective. That’s nuts. The problem they need to solve is that they have larger teams that aren’t effective. Getting rid of the teams is a cleaner solution. That way, they’ll have more money to buy all the start-ups that are smoking them on innovation.

When I first came across YouTube, I loved it. It was cool, quirky content that you wouldn’t find anywhere else.  Now it feels like a public bus station. 

The first problem is that the taste of the proles reigns supreme.  Of the All Time Top 10 videos, 8 are from professional entertainers. 7 are music videos from the likes of Beyonce and Akon.  1 is a Turkish video that got 25 million views because a ‘bot keeps playing it somewhere in Turkey. And only 1 is the cool stuff that made everyone think that YouTube was awesome.   If I wanted Music Videos, I’d go to MTV.com.  Is YouTube doing anything cool if it’s just another TV station? 

The second problem is that people game the system. In addition to the Turkish video being the number 6 all time, check this out.  I did a search for “Cute Cat” and sorted by view count.  The number one video is a little boy with no cats involved. They over tagged the video so that they would get lots of views, and drive traffic to their web page.  With the masses watching Akon, and the tagging being useless, how’s a poor sap supposed to find an edgey cool video that he’d never see elsewhere?

Certainly not by looking at what’s popular on YouTube.    (For all my bitching, here’s a music video I like.)