Forbes currently has a very interesting article about the Google culture and its employee perks. One especially stands out. It is how they handle the death of one of its employees:
Should a Googler pass away while under the employ of the 14-year old search giant, their surviving spouse or domestic partner will receive a check for 50% of their salary every year for the next decade. […] In addition to the 10-year pay package, surviving spouses will see all stocks vested immediately and any children will receive a $1,000 monthly payment from the company until they reach the age of 19 (or 23 if the child is a full-time student).
It is very interesting as this is a perk which is a no-win for Google. However, there is an underlying – very impressive – philosophy behind it:
“But it turns out that the reason we’re doing these things for employees is not because it’s important to the business, but simply because it’s the right thing to do. When it comes down to it, it’s better to work for a company who cares about you than a company who doesn’t. And from a company standpoint, that makes it better to care than not to care.”
Interesting comparison. It would be great to see the absolute figures next to the relative ones. What strikes me most is that Apple is still way up there and even accelerating its growth. It has by far the most revenue out of the top 5 companies. Very impressive indeed.
As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.
“When confronted with a list of results from Google, the average user (including myself until I read this article) tends to assume that the list is exhaustive. Not knowing that it isn’t … is equivalent to not having a choice. Depending on the quality of the search results, it can be said that I am being fed junk — because I don’t know I have other choices that Google filtered out.” – Aubrey Pek, commenting on Kim Zetter’s “Junk Food Algorithms”:
Provided current growth rates for new app uploads are maintained, research2guidance expects Android Market to reach 425,000 apps next August, effectively overtaking App Store in size.
According to the firm, Android Market added 28,000 new apps in April 2011, whereas Apple lagged behind with only 11,000 new apps.
Mashable reports that Google is working hard on developing its own tablet pc. To do so, it is apparently teaming up with HTC again.
So far Google hasn’t announced such plans publicly. Since Apple presented its iPad the tablet market has heated up. Other companies (e.g. Nokia) are developing own devices.
I believe tablets are somewhat overrated. They sure are nice gadgets and I can think of several very interesting use cases for them. However, will they really be game changers like the iPhone or the iPod? What do you think?
This is an interesting chart which shows where Microsoft’s profit comes from. And make no mistake, Microsoft is still the most profitable software company in the world.
Its profits are still being generated by the same engines that have driven Microsoft for years: Office, Windows, and its server division. (Meanwhile, its entertainment and devices division is only recently profitable again, and its online division is a money pit.)
This is why Google is increasingly focusing on disrupting Microsoft’s core businesses, including its Google Docs rival to Office; its Chrome OS rival to Windows; and now Google Buzz, an add-on to Gmail that some have compared most closely to Sharepoint, one of Microsoft’s enterprise tools.
In her great post, Danah Boyd – researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society – excellently explains why the reasoning made by Marc Zuckerbergs’ privacy statements is wrong.
Sure, social media has changed the way we communicate. However, just like in the real world there are scenarios where we want to tell certain people things others shouldn’t know about (and I am not talking about illegal activities).
The most important thing is that I want to have control over what I have to say and to whom I say it. And to make my content “public” should be the choice not the other way around. “Opt-In” instead of “Opt-out”.
Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It’s about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It’s about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me “public by default, private when necessary” but this doesn’t suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.
In the end it all boils down to the fact that Facebook can earn a lot more money when the information is publicly available than when the information is sealed off. So please Facebook, be frank and don’t sell us the new privacy rules as beneficial to us users. The changes are a strategic move for you to grow your business. And there is nothing wrong with that… just please be transparent about it.
When companies start to imitate one another, it’s usually either an extreme case of flattery—or war. In the case of Google and Apple, it’s both. They are merely 10 miles apart from each other in Silicon Valley and for almost a decade the two have been on good terms. Apparently, those times are now over.
With the Nexus One, Goole enters the Hardware game – threatening Apples iPhone. Apple recently acquired Quattro Wireless – an upstart advertising company that excels at targeting ads to mobile-phone users based on their behavior. With this acquisition Apple not only aims to create completely new mobile ads, apparently, they want to make search on mobile phones obsolete. An attack directed at the heart of Google.
In the next months the Apple-Google battle might get even much rougher. What happens if Apple decides to dump Google as the default search engine on its devices? This would be an obvious move as it would cut Google off from mobile data that could be used to improve its advertising and Android technology. Nevertheless, Apple needs search on the iPhone. This could even go so far that Steve Jobs could cut a deal with – gasp! – Microsoft to make Bing Apple’s engine of choice, or even launch its own search engine.
If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.
