by Sören Stamer August 14, 2007 at 10:54 PM

First things first: I do admire Google for what they have achieved in such a short time. And I still like all the people at Google that I know personally.

Well, I also like their search tools and most of their other amazingly innovative services like Google Earth, Google Maps, etc.

Google has fundamentally changed the world we live in. They made Bill Gates' vision "information at your fingertips" mainly come true. Actually, I was one of Google's big fans. I loved them for being different, for "don't be evil" and for all the smart and funny ideas around the Google logo.

However, something important has changed: I don't like Google anymore.

About 15 to 18 months ago they started to lose my friendship. I became more and more skeptical:

Was "don't be evil" great marketing or a great vision? What do they really think about transparency? Where can I see my own profile with all the profile data Google has collected about me over years now? Where can I delete all the entries about myself I dislike? Do they own my profile data? Do they provide my profile data to government authorities on request? Who is Google in person?

I’ve realized that it is way too dangerous in the long run to have a single company with such a huge power over all of us getting stronger and stronger. It simply feels wrong.

And we ain't seen nothing yet. For Google it seems to be pretty easy to enter and dominate also other markets. They offer more and more attractive services for free, collect even more and better profile data and sell a lot more ads. They started with search, added mail, maps, blogs, calendar, analytics, office applications, video, and the like. Then, they added billing and telephony. More to come. Now they are well positioned to become the biggest operator on earth.

Obviously, Google doesn't have to make any money with those services directly. It is enough to improve their user profiles and they will earn more with AdSense.

This makes it pretty tough to compete with Google due to Google's strategic positioning.

And it’s getting worse. If you are a mobile operator you can choose one of two evils: If you bring Google onto your phones your customers will be happy and Google gets stronger. So you lose ground. But if you block Google and promote your own search your customers won't be happy at all and so you lose ground again.

What about copying Google? Well, it is not very likely that another company can do what Google did. The existing network effects for Google are way too strong. And another huge search company won't solve the underlying problem. Such a highly centralized power seems to be way too dangerous for normal enterprises.

So if you want to beat Google you have to change the rules of the game. You can't outperform Google the Google way.

Here is my best guess for mobile operators and any other companies that are afraid of Google and want to compete:

Go open source

Google uses a lot of decentralized mechanisms to create innovations and they hire loads of smart people. However, the whole world is still smarter than Google alone. So let's go for open source to build an open and trusted alternative to Google.

Be transparent

Google is non-transparent and non-transparency kills trust. So let's make everything transparent to you as a user, the algorithms, the source code, the policies, your profile, etc. If someone wants to change his/her profile that is fine as well. If someone doesn't like to be profiled that is fine too.

Support the Wikipedia universe

Google is a global brand everyone knows and looks for. So we need to have an even better global brand with more trust. Wikipedia.

So let's spend some money to make Wikiasearch the world’s greatest search engine, the first one being open and trusted as well.

It will be a different game for Google: It is all about trust - an extremely powerful force. Fortunately, even Google cannot win this game against Wikipedia us all.

I am really curious how long it takes until the big operators will start to implement this plan.

Well, we ain't seen nothing yet.

by Willms Buhse November 01, 2006 at 01:41 PM

Last week I was invited to give a keynote at the mobile content day in Munich. Here's a quick summary of my thoughts (slides here):

More and more content becomes available for mobile phone users. But how can all this be found? Are searches on Google or shopping lists on Amazon really engaging? Technology changes fast, social behaviour takes its time.
By looking back to social behaviour - how did people discover content a decade ago? In two engaging ways:

• either by spontaneous buy by discovering the offering in record stores (maybe triggered by radio or MTV before)
• or by recommendation: a friend tells you about his favourites - and you want them too.

So how can content technology support this social behaviour? I believe strongly in mobile TV and - yes - superdistribution will play a major role in discovery of mobile content. And in both cases DRM interoperability is mandatory to ensure that different content types can be consumed across a multitude of devices in a trusted environment.