Posts Tagged ‘google’

What the Print Industry Can Learn from the Open Source Model

The conflict between traditional print media companies and Google has been heating up for some time and Google appears to have had enough. The “Hamburg Declaration” effectively said that publishers (including several major newspapers in Europe) are tired of other news aggregation sites using their content for free. Google’s response to the declaration last week was an effective “fine, we don’t have to help you”. Reading between the lines: they want part of Google’s earnings on search. But why should Google give them any? It’s not like anyone forced them to not innovate. The market and old business model have snuck away from them, but how can they get it back?

While it’s true that these news publishers can turn off search engine indexing, can they live without it and at what cost is it to them for it to exist? As Google is quick to point out, their search engine and Google News sites send over a billion visits to newspaper sites a month. Of course, we can only imagine what kind of traffic impact that a loss of search engine referrals would have to any single newspaper site unless they tell us, but I would imagine it would be a pretty big hit. Assuming that these site owners know how to place their ads (a crucial skill for any newspaper), a loss in traffic should mean a loss in revenue.

Okay, so if they can’t do without Google and other search engines, then just what can they do?

Well, for starters, I’d encourage them to pick up a copy of “Who Moved My Cheese” to change their mindset. Seriously, read it. For those who have read the book, their cheese has officially been moved. They’re sitting at the empty cheese station all pissed off at the rest of the technology industry demanding that someone put their cheese back. Guess what? It’s gone. It’s not coming back.

Second, find alternative ways to reach readers where they are. If Google News is such a popular site even though it’s pointing to their site, it only means one thing: consumers want different packaging. I’m among the part of society that grew up alongside the Internet. I don’t go to Fox News every day to get my news. I know that there’s information overload out there and I need to learn to filter. That’s why I use search engines, an RSS reader (though not as much anymore), Twitter and the technology section of Digg to get the news I want and nothing more. I don’t go to Fox News’ home page hourly or daily (depending upon your desire for news) to get my news. I follow the types of information and people I’m interested in on Twitter to get updates as they are coming without all the noise in the way. There are millions of others out there like me and we’re not getting any younger or fewer.

So, how do publishers re-package their content? That’s the million dollar question (well, hopefully multiples of that if you can get it right!). The Wall Street Journal has taken a unique twist to the traditional subscription-based model and allow readers to read the first article they are linked to from Google, but then force the user to pay for more content. Not a bad model, really. It’s classic. Get ‘em in with a freebie (with absolutely no strings attached) and then convince them your content is good enough to buy a subscription. Of course, there may be a few oversights in their implementation, the idea is there.

Along with “Who Moved My Cheese”, they also need to read NIN’s Trent Reznor’s take on business models in the music industry. The music industry suffers from a big problems for its artists. They are no longer making as much money due to piracy. Is this a problem? Well, it’s certainly questionable, but guess what? It’s not going away. It can’t be prevented and people are in general going to not pay money for something if they don’t want to. Their cheese has moved as well. Reznor seems to have figured out where the new cheese is at (okay, I’ll stop with the cheese references).

His strategy? Give the music away. Yes, give it away. When you give it away, you can build a bigger fan base. When those fans like you enough, they will pay for other things than the music. Sell HD music video downloads. Sell limited editions of the album on CD (yes, a lot of people do still like to run down to the music store and buy CDs).

For the print industry, just replace words music and fans above with newspapers and subscribers. So, just what can you sell to consumers? I don’t know. If I knew, I wouldn’t be telling you, I’d be beating your business into the ground. If Google News is the packaging that consumers want, then give them more of what they want. Compete. As Matt Asay says of iTunes and free content: the content by itself is okay, the packaging by itself is worthless, but the combination is killer.

While Sam Zell of Tribune Co. asks “If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?”, I have to ask: If all the newspapers in American did not adjust to the way users are finding and using their content, how profitable would those newspapers be? The answer is that they’d be extinct, just like Google if there was no content for it to aggregate and index.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jul 17th, 2009

Are We Going to See a Dogfight in the Web Docs Clouds?

Microsoft has finally announced formally something that we’ve all been speculating would happen for some time. Office 2010 will have not only an online version, but both paid and (the big news) a free version on the web. Microsoft is, of course, dominating the traditional ‘brick-and-mortar’ desktop-based office productivity software with their Office product already. They are entering the online document market with competitors Google and Zoho already with a decent foothold on the online market. Unfortunately for Google, Zoho, and others, Microsoft has a pretty good reputation from its Office client and anything with the Office label is probably going to be accepted by consumers.

As Matt Asay points out in Microsoft’s strategy in the virtualization market, ‘good enough’ and convenience sometimes are plenty to take over a market. Microsoft has something that Google and Zoho do not: desktop operating system market share. Just like Microsoft has done in the browser market to take over most of the market until Firefox came around (they still hold the majority), they essentially have a ‘botnet’ of users in Windows users. If the integration with Windows 7 and Office online is ‘good enough’ and integrated in the OS already, users may be drawn to it out of simplicity. Often consumers don’t care about what technology is better. In fact, I would argue that most of the time they don’t care about what’s better. They just care about what is easily available and the quickest. If Office online can meet their needs in a pinch, they probably won’t explore other options.

On the flip side of that, Google and Zoho do have a pretty good foothold in the web-based docs market. Google Docs or Zoho just might be ‘good enough’ to keep users already using their services. Plus, services like these often don’t integrate with others, so they tend to be somewhat viral in nature since collaboration with others requires those users to sign up for those services. As OS X and Linux start to become more popular alternatives to Windows, Microsoft’s advantages in integrating its OS may start to diminish, but their marketshare is still pretty high.

We still have to see exactly what Microsoft has up its sleeves for features in Office Web. Microsoft is calling their Office Web apps an “online companion” to its desktop applications, so we will see what they offer in features. Promised features so far are the ability to create documents and do basic editing, something that both Google and Zoho can blow out of the water. Only time will tell what will happen, but Google and Zoho seem to have finally brought Microsoft out of its fortified position on the ground with Office to do battle in the clouds.

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Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Jul 14th, 2009

Google Officially Announces Desktop Linux-based OS

In their official blog, Google has finally let us know once and for all that they are working on a full-fledged desktop Linux-based operating system. The OS will be called Google Chrome OS. The OS should not be confused with a) the Google Chrome browser and b) the Android OS. According to the entry, Android was designed to be used with phones, set-top boxes, and netbooks. Chrome OS is designed to run on netbooks, laptops, and desktops. The official description looks like this:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

They have said that the OS will focus on speed, simplicity, and security. They have reportedly built it upon the Linux kernel with their own OS in between including their own window management platform. As Google focuses on web applications, they are certainly going to be blurring the line between web and desktop application judging by the comment:

All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies.

Whatever the case, it’s nice that we can finally put to rest all the rumors about this fabled Google OS that’s Android or maybe not Android.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jul 8th, 2009

Gmail Gets Drag-and-Drop

gmail-drag-n-drop I love the Gmail interface, but one of the things that I miss going from my Zimbra accounts at work to Gmail is that there’s no drag-and-drop. Well, that all changed when I logged into my account today. I don’t know that I would call drag-and-drop in a web email client a killer feature, necessarily, but as Google works to make web applications feel more like desktop applications, features like drag-and-drop will become more and more important. I was actually surprised that it took this long for them to bring this feature to Gmail. In a world where the push is to mix cloud and desktop applications, having these interfaces the same is going to be crucial.

The drag-and-drop interface does leave a bit to be desired as you actually have to grab a handle to the left of the message rather than just grabbing the message itself, but it’s something. I would expect that you would be able to just click and hold on either the subject or the sender within the interface to grab the message as this is the behavior in most desktop clients, but we will see.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jul 2nd, 2009

Google Voice and the Future of Telephony

When Google announced Google Voice, I looked at it, thought it was intriguing, and kept on my merry way. Now that it’s here and available by invite, I started looking at it and am realizing that it’s much bigger than I originally had thought. It’s not just another VoIP service, it’s a paradigm shift for telephones. It’s doing to phone routing what we have done with email. Your individual phones really just become clients that connect to a central call routing system of some sort.

The idea goes something like this: You have one number to give out to others. That number can ring at your desk at work, your home, and on your mobile phone. Depending upon who’s calling, you could even have it ring your spouse’s phone as well. That’s not a huge paradigm shift from what standard VoIP systems are today, but it allows you to have greater flexibility in using phones from outside your VoIP systems and multiple ones at the same time, meanwhile, adding some pretty sweet features to boot.

In the future, I can see this becoming the standard way of having a phone and simply buying a device to hook into the Internet from what is now your cell phone or home phone provider. Much the way Thunderbird or Outlook or your Blackberry hook into your mail server and pull down all the same mail, your phones simply listen for calls from one centralized place. This idea only makes sense since we really don’t want to have to keep track of multiple numbers and try multiple places to reach someone. We just want to reach them. We do the same with our searches, our documents, and with our emails. Why not with our phone calls?

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (1) : Jun 25th, 2009

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