IndustryNYT On Google As Threat To Other Businesses

NYT On Google As Threat To Other Businesses

Threadwatch points to

Just Googling It Is Striking Fear Into Companies
from the New York Times, yet another piece that
will fuel the view as Google conquering the world.

Wal-mart is quoted as watching Google closely and described as seeing them as
the seed of a threat, since it might be able to tell shoppers if better bargains
are nearby. Nope, we can’t have that!

We get more irrational exuberance of the type I haven’t seen since 2003,

when
New York Times quoted someone comparing Google to God. This time,
Google slips in the view of one to:

Google is the realization of everything that we thought the Internet was
going to be about but really wasn’t until Google.

Oh, come on! Get a grip. Google offers search results, wasn’t the first to do
that, did raise the bar and stayed ahead for about two years, but Yahoo and Ask
Jeeves in particular deliver a great experience as well. This makes Google the realization
of everything the internet was supposed to be?

Yep, Google does cool things. Gmail is cool and an advancement, but again,
one that others have caught up with (and don’t make you use a flippin’ SMS
messaging system to sign-up for it). Google Maps is way cool and another
advancement, but it’s hardly the realization of everything the internet was to
be about.

Heck, I don’t even know that anyone can agree on what the internet was
supposed to be about, but I darn well know that if I grab 10 people off the
street, they won’t all agree that Google is the sum total of everything. In the end,
Google and any search engines aren’t everything. They are only pointers to
everything, to the actual content that people want.

Rant aside, the story’s funny from citing Bill Gates as saying that in a year
or so, they’ll demonstrate that MSN Search is better than Google. Yep, we’ll
see. They’ve still got tons of catching up to do, plus we’ve yet to see any
movement on how the industry will agree on testing that would let us know
whether to believe the “proof” that’s put out.

The article touches on Google apparently still debating a real estate
service, plus revisiting the entire giving internet access away for free idea.
Newspapers, telecoms are other industries looking at the Google thread.

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