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Amid all the buzz about Web 2.0 services run by AJAX, such as Google Maps and Microsoft’s new Windows Live , it’s interesting to see that Yahoo has gone with Flash for its new and improved Yahoo Maps site. But is it better than Google Maps? There seems to be some debate on that, with some saying they like it better and others complaining that it’s slower to refresh and harder to use. I thought Yahoo’s version looked a little better in terms of the user interface than Google’s, and it was also quicker to update the map when I zoomed in on key spots, such as the Rouge River marsh near Pickering, Ontario, which I run and bicyle past every morning. Dragging the map around seemed slower on Yahoo than on Google, but Yahoo had some cool features, such as a draggable zoom window.

Although he gets into the useability a bit in his discussion of Yahoo’s maps, Robert Scoble of Microsoft spends most of his time talking about how both Yahoo Maps and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth are “doomed.” Why? Not because of the interface, he says, but because of how Google markets both its services and its open API — which allows others to create “mash-ups” and add-ons that enhance the value of the company’s map service. I think this is a good point. It’s not so much what you do, but how you do it, and what happens to it after you release it into the wild, so to speak. Google seems to get that better than others — so far at least.

Is it just me, or does it feel like 1995 all over again? Not just because tech is back, but because Microsoft supremo Bill G. is talking about how Microsoft has gotten religion when it comes to the Web and interactivity, and wants to deliver a host of services over the Net — such as Windows Live Messenger (the new name for MSN Messenger), Live Favourites, Windows Live Mail (the successor to Hotmail), Office Live and a bunch of other things that all contain the word “live” (Of course, I’m probably not the only one to draw the obvious conclusion, which is that if everything is now “live” then by definition Microsoft’s previous products were “dead”).

In any case, Microsoft seems to have decided that since everyone is releasing things in beta now, it might as well do the same. Several of the ideas at ideas.live.com are invitation-only, while others such as the live.com webpage are buggy. This is odd, since start.com — which is virtually identical to live.com and has been around for months — works great even in Firefox and has features that live.com doesn’t. Live.com doesn’t support Firefox, has layout issues in my browser (Avant, which is basically just a front-end to IE), and crashed my Internet Explorer when I tried to load the page. So far, live.com doesn’t do anything that netvibes.com doesn’t do better, and does some things worse. Colour me unimpressed. I am not alone.

P.S. More than one person has noted how ironic it is that the Windows Live demo — one of the most highly-anticipated demos in years — crashed right at the moment Blake Irving was saying: “It’s easy. It’s live, and it has ‘me’ at the center of the universe.” Dave Winer called it “the worst public demo ever.”

Update: InformationWeek, in a blog posting on Windows Live, calls it “a big ol’ bucket of vaporware” while Russell Beattie says Microsoft is really working on “Monopoly 4.0” and Phil Wainewright says the software giant has simply cobbled together whatever they could find to give the impression that they haven’t missed the Web-services boat.

Here’s a column I just posted at globeandmail.com about Google resuming its Library scanning project:

Google, the search-engine giant that has become so ubiquitous its name hardly even sounds stupid any more, has started scanning and indexing library books again under its contentious Google Print Library project, despite the fact that the company is being sued by several groups of authors and publishers. Under the project, Google has plans to scan millions of books from the collections of several university libraries, including Harvard, Stanford and the University of Michigan. The groups that have sued — including the Authors Guild, which represents several thousand U.S. writers, and the Association of American Publishers — argue that by doing so, Google is infringing on their copyright and therefore it must stop.

Continue reading “Column: Let Google scan…”

Ed Whitacre, CEO of SBC Telecommunications, tells Businessweek magazine that as far as he’s concerned, telecoms and cable companies get to control the Internet:

“Q. How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?

A. How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!”

That’s a nice try, Ed. You may not be the only one to try that kind of thing, but let’s see you try to block access to Skype or Gmail unless someone pays up. And don’t large bandwidth users pay for traffic carried on a cable or telecom network already? SBC’s new business model sounds a little bit like extortion to me. Former Release 1.0 editor Kevin Werbach says we should be afraid. More discussion on the Interesting People list.

Update: The Washington Post has a story criticizing Ed, in which an SBC spokesman does some serious backpedalling on the whole arging-chay for andwidth-bay thing.

Cory over at boingboing.net points to a great discussion of Google’s library book-scanning project that was conducted on computing guru David Farber’s invitation-only “interesting people” mailing list. Tim O’Reilly, who took part in the discussion, has a description on O’Reilly Radar. For example, Sid Karin notes that mp3.com lost a lawsuit launched by the record industry after the company set up a CD library that would let you listen to streaming digital music files, provided you could prove you owned the original CD they came from. The suit was fought in part on the principle that mp3.com was violating copyright simply by making digital copies of the CDs, much as publishers are arguing that Google is infringing on their copyright simply by scanning books, even though it will not be making the full text available online. Also on the list, Seth Finkelstein points to a wide-ranging discussion about the subject over at the Scrivener’s Error blog.

If Forbes magazine was looking for some attention from the Internet, they certainly got what they were asking for. Unfortunately, it isn’t coming because of some fine-quality, well-written journalism, but because of what bloggers are taking as a drive-by-shooting style rant about how bloggers are dirty, rotten, lying scumbags. The piece by Daniel Lyons is more or less about a battle between one man whose company and stock were hammered by a blogger who pretended to be someone else, but along the way Lyons casts some aspersions against bloggers as a whole. Reaction (not surprisingly) has come from far and wide, including Dan Gillmor at Bayosphere, Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion, the guys over at We Break Stuff and Paul Kedrosky at Infectious Greed. Is it a deliberate attempt by Forbes to get some coverage in the blog-o-sphere — even if it’s negative? Perhaps. Or it could just be that publisher Malcolm Forbes got a bee in his bonnet about blogs for some reason. Meanwhile, Chris Pirillo notes sarcastically that magazines also suffer from some of the same problems. But Om Malik (who used to work for the magazine before he moved to Business 2.0, says he is reserving judgment for the moment.

Update: In a great piece for abcnews.com, Michael Malone — former editor of Forbes’ ASAP technology magazine and long-time Silicon Valley observer — talks about blogs and notes that the business magazine is the “one of the best technology counter-indicators I know.”

Here’s a column I just posted to the Globeandmail.com website, about Jerry Zucker’s $1-billion bid for Hudson’s Bay Co.: “To U.S. investor Jerry Zucker, who has just launched a takeover bid for the oldest company in North America — The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading Into Hudson’s Bay, otherwise known as Hudson’s Bay Co. — we have just one thing to say: Best of luck.

Way back when, this legendary company may have controlled more than a third of what is now Canada, and part of the northern United States, but here in 2005 it barely controls anything. HBC may be the largest remaining department store retailer in Canada, but it has achieved that title mostly by default, since Simpson’s went out of business decades ago, Eaton’s went bankrupt (not once but twice) and eventually ceased to exist, and Sears has shrunk to a shadow of its former self and is on life support.”

Continue reading “Column: Best of luck, Jerry…”

Whether it’s fear of a new bubble or just a desire to be contrary, the backlash against Web 2.0 continues to grow — or at least, a backlash against the hordes of companies that have emerged offering a variety of Web-based services using Ajax and other interactive technologies, and against some of the acquisitions and valuations that have been tossed around in the wake of deals for companies such as Jason Calcanis’s Weblogs Inc. The latter got a lot of people doing some back of the envelope calculations , to see how much their blogs or sites might be worth. Meanwhile, others such as Nicholas Carr at Rough Type have been protesting some of the assumptions that seem to underly the Web 2.0 movement, including the worship of sites such as Wikipedia.org. One of the latest to add his reasonably well-argued criticisms to the fray is tech blogger Russell Beattie, who dismisses most of the existing Web 2.0 companies as scrapers, mashers or lame copycats of Flickr.

Is it just me, or is alpha the new beta? Looking around at all the Web 2.0 apps that keep popping up like mushrooms after a rain shower, the number of companies doing alpha or “invitation only” beta tests seems to be increasing exponentially. It’s not just me, because others have noticed too. Of course, Google is probably to blame for some of this, since it continues to keep products in beta mode long after most companies (cough… Microsoft… cough) would have released them, including Gmail. There’s no doubt that the kind of attention Gmail got when it first appeared probably led to a few companies deciding to try the same exclusivity approach. Why not soft-launch in invitation-only mode, and let the buzz do the rest? Hence the proliferation of “submit your email and we’ll see if you make the grade” offerings from companies such as Riya and Wink. Of course, there is a downside to riding the buzz train, which is that the buzz could overtake the reality and lead to a mini-backlash against the product, as the developers of the Flock browser found recently.

The latest secret project to trickle out of the Google search labs is something called “Google Base,” which several people — including Tony Roscoe — discovered while snooping around on the Internet. Apart from being a great excuse to revive the old “all your base are belong to us” gag from a few years ago, it appears to be an open database of some kind that Google intends to launch — which many observers have speculated could become a kind of on-line classified section, much like the popular Craigslist, which eBay now owns part of. Others, including Forrester Researcher staffer Charlene Li, think it could be more than that. Some believe that it could be part of Google’s big move into real estate listings, and could coincide with the launch of another rumoured Google offering, a payment scheme dubbed Google Wallet. For its part, the search giant — in typical fashion — is staying pretty mum on the subject.

Perhaps it’s a sign that the Web is maturing, but there’s been a growing chorus of criticism (like this one from Nicholas Carr) about the mighty Wikipedia, the “open source” encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to or edit entries in. One of the more recent pieces to take on the topic — in a somewhat balanced way (although the compliments seem to be trotted out mostly so it doesn’t look too one-sided) — comes from Robert McHenry, former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Of course, Mr. McHenry is hardly a disinterested observer, since the EB is one of those that has likely suffered thanks to the popularity of the Wikipedia, and the Britannica also comes in for some criticism of its own errors, which have their own entry in the Wikipedia. In any case, even Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has admitted that the project is still in development and that it does have some obvious flaws.

Here’s a column I just finished posting at globeandmail.com about departing Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan:

“During the U.S. presidential election campaign in 2000, Senator John McCain was asked what he would do if something were to happen to Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan. The Senator replied: “God forbid, I would do like they did in the movie ‘Weekend at Bernie’s.’ I would prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him.”

In a single sentence, Mr. McCain summed up just how much the U.S. stock market, and as a result much of the American economy, had come to rely on the central banker known in some circles as “The Maestro.” The Senator’s joke also hinted at the very real truth that the Federal Reserve chairman’s presence alone — rather than any specific act by the central bank — was enough to soothe investors.”

Continue reading “Column: So long, Mr. Greenspan…”

Here’s a column I posted at globeandmail.com on Google’s quarterly results:

“First things first: Anyone who wishes they had bought even a few shares of Google when it went public a little over a year ago, at the now bargain-basement price of $87 (U.S.), raise your hand — the one you’re not slapping yourself silly with, that is.
Plenty of people (including yours truly, if you must know) scoffed at the idea that Google’s stock would take off like a rocket after its IPO. Some analysts at the time were projecting a stock value of $145 a share and a total market capitalization for the company of $25-billion. Dream on, others said (including yours truly).

And where is Google now? Closing in on $350 per share, which would give the company a market value of almost $100-billion — just shy of Coca-Cola and a little behind networking giant Cisco Systems. Shares of Google jumped more than 12 per cent on Friday, after the company announced its quarterly results, results that blew the doors off most estimates.

Of course, one of the complicating factors when it comes to valuing Google is that the search company doesn’t provide a whole lot of information about its business, and doesn’t give forecasts for upcoming quarters, the way most companies do. For the time being at least, that is playing in Google’s favour, allowing it to obliterate even the most positive forecast from Wall Street analysts. Among other things, the search leader seems to be changing a lot of peoples’ minds about the wisdom of a totally advertising-driven business model, and the growth in demand for Internet search-based advertising in particular, and it is growing much faster than the rest of the industry. Continue reading “Column: Google wows the crowd”

Here’s a column I posted at globeandmail.com about RIM’s partnership with Palm:

“For something that seemed like a blockbuster deal, the announcement that Research In Motion would license its BlackBerry email software to handheld maker (and competitor) Palm Inc. did surprisingly little to boost RIM’s stock price. After spiking by a small amount on Monday, the shares drifted back down to about where they were a week ago, which is about 20-per-cent lower than they were in September, and in fact isn’t that far off the 52-week low of $60 (U.S.) the shares hit in March. Why would a deal to license its software to Palm — a company that virtually invented the handheld market, and has one of the hottest devices going in its Treo 650 smart-phone — cause such a muted reaction from the stock market?

There are a couple of possible explanations. One favoured by some analysts who follow the company is that this deal has already been “priced in” to the stock, which means that investors were more or less expecting RIM and Palm to do a deal. After all, RIM just recently signed a similar arrangement with cellphone-handset leader Nokia, so Palm shouldn’t have come as a surprise. That’s difficult to rationalize, however, considering the company’s share price is down by about 20 per cent. What else was being “priced in” to the stock that isn’t being priced in any more? Another possibility is that investors are more concerned with the ongoing litigation between RIM and NTP, the U.S. company that claims it holds a patent on wireless e-mail technology. Continue reading “Column: RIM helps out Palm”

Here’s a column I posted at globeandmail.com on the hype over “Web 2.0”:

“In the beginning, the Web was made up of low-tech websites with grainy images, and interactivity consisted of an “e-mail me” icon that looked like a spinning envelope. Then came Flash, Javascript and Java, which allowed users to interact more with the content on a site, by clicking buttons or watching animations. Gradually, those developments blurred the line between using a service on a website and using an application on a desktop. Now, the industry is buzzing about something that has been dubbed “Web 2.0″ — a new level of interactivity that allows websites to provide desktop-like functionality with nothing but a browser and a high-speed Internet connection.

This idea was the backdrop for the recent news that Google and Sun Microsystems had decided to work together on… well, something. If Web 2.0 fans were hoping for a blockbuster announcement that would add some fireworks to the concept — and it’s clear that they were, given the amount of speculation that preceded the Google-Sun press conference — what they got was more of a “damp squib,” as someone put it. Even though the actual news was underwhelming, however (Sun agreed to bundle Google’s toolbar with its Java engine), the two hinted that there would be more, and some observers see Google eventually offering desktop-style applications in addition to its web-based email and satellite photo services. Continue reading “Column: Web 2.0 or hype 2.0?”