"Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra is ‘Bullshit’"

Wired says that as is traditional after a big Apple announcement, at a Town Hall at One Infinite Loop, Jobs took questions from Apple employees. In response to a question about Google, Jobs said, “This don’t be evil mantra: ‘It’s bullshit.’”

“Obviously, he was reacting to Google’s push into the phone business, which Apple regards as its exclusive turf. “We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says.”

The article goes on to say that “Google, which last week in a somewhat more modest development bypassed Apple’s iPhone app blockade by unveiling an html5 version of Google Voice, which takes full advantage of mobile Safari on the iPhone.”

Google believes that the future is really in web-based applications and not in mobile apps at all. Web-based applications of the sort html5, which Google ardently backs, makes much more viable. Also, Google believes in Open Source, while Apple clings to its closed, proprietary model.

Jobs doth protest too much, methinks.

Backing away from its earlier stance, the White House has now officially endorsedGoogle’s position to no longer censor according to China’s whims.

Here’s White House spokesman Robert Gibbs today, per MarketWatch:

“We support [Google's] action…in a decision to no longer censor searches that happen using the [Google] platform,” Gibbs told reporters. He added that “our concern is with actions that threaten the universal rights of a free Internet.”

(The GoogleGazer promised Craig Keefner that he’d stay away from “politics” on is blog; accordingly, expect the GoogleGazer to throtle back comments that might be viewed that way. Hat tip to Craig, whose fine blog is available here).

Google China

One of China’s top propaganda officials on Thursday reaffirmed the state’s commitment to censoring the internet, showing no sign of compromising in the face of Google’s threat to quit the country.

Wang Chen, head of the State Council Information Office and deputy head of the Communist party’s propaganda department, said internet media “must live up to their responsibility of maintaining internet security”.

“We must do our best to intensify self-discipline among internet media to guarantee internet security,” he said.

The story requires a subscription.

Henry Blodget approves of Google’s actions. He said,

Google’s decision to make a big public threat now, when it controls 15%-20% of China’s search market and is known to most Chinese Internet users, will put far more pressure on the Chinese government to relax its policies than a boycott of the country five years ago would have.

Google matters in China now. The announcement that Google was threatening to pull out spawned public support for the company in China. It got Secretary of State Hillary Clinton into the act. It forced the Chinese government to respond with a statement. It has grabbed the attention of investors, as well as the hundreds of other companies that do business in China and are forced to play by Chinese rules. It will focus more public attention on the reality of China’s censorship policies than any boycott ever could have.

In short, by playing ball with China until it had some real leverage, Google has a much better chance of actually forcing the government to change.

While the GoogleGazer does not always find himself in agreement with Mr. Blodget, in this instance. We all need to hope he is right.

Kamelia Angelova has a detailed post on Google’s China saga in Silicon Alley Insider. Click on each visual to go on to the next.

On January 12, 2010, Google announced “A new approach to China” on its blog. Back in January 2006, when Google first entered China it noted that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.
The blog went on to say,

[the sophisticated attacks on Google's infrastructure] and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

The GoogleGazer’s mission is to stay on top of all thing Google. So we read with great interest the story entitled “U.S. Holds Fire in Google-China Feud” published in the Wall Street Journal that reported on the responses to Google’s announcement.

The thrust of the article was that the U.S. government, as well as many businessmen ran for cover for fear of antagonizing China.

I was disappointed, but not at all surprised that President Obama’s wish to be loved trumps standing up for what’s right. No other world leader has such an insecurity. As leaders of their respective countries, they do what’s best for their countries’ self interests. Unfortunately, ours does not, because he wants all nations to love him, so he can never take a principled stand. Our enemies have all figured it out, and so have our allies. As Rodney Dangerfield said, he “don’t get no respect.” .”

Let’s face it. China’s behavior was and is abhorrent. It is a corrupt, totalitarian regime that shows contempt for its own people, for intellectual property, and for the USA, its largest trading partner. Why? Because it can. And because its leaders seek to remain in power at any cost. Ditto Iran. And he list goes on.

So when Google finally took a strong stand on China’s censorship and interception of private mail, it was sad, but surely no surprise that the Obama administration gave Google but tepid support. The Obama administration was “wary of taking sides in Google Inc.’s battle with China,” said the Journal.

Since when is the fight for freedom Google’s fight and not their fight?

Jun Jing responded to my comments in the Journal:

USA is not China’s “largest trading partner”, the EU is. And the USA’s importance to China is diminishing by the day as more and more protectionist barriers are being setup by Obama administration. Wait till China becomes really disgusted by this and start to dump treasury bills. Google is just a very insignificant player in the grand scheme of things. If they really want to stand up against Chinese government why do they still keep the filter on?

Last I looked, Europe is a continent and the USA is a country. Indeed, the US is China’s largest trading partner. Readers would do well to read, or reread Hannah Arendt’s book, The Origins of Totalitarianism (German: Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft). It describes and analyzes the two major totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, Nazism and Stalinism. Many of the same apologetics uttered by Mr. Jing and by selfish businessmen reluctant to antagonize China for fear of losing sales were said in the Nazi era in defense of the indefensible.(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism for a quick summary of Arendt’s book). George Santayana, in his Reason in Common Sense, The Life of Reason, Vol.1, famously wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Take heed.
You have been given fair warning.

(The claim that “Google is just a very insignificant player in the grand scheme of things” is too silly to deserve a response.)

Google App users can now upload any type of file to the cloud with Google Docs.
Main features:
- Individual file size limit of 250MB.
- Ability to upload files such as CAD, HTML, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, RAW photos, ZIP or RAR archives.
- 1GB storage limit for files you upload that are not converted to Google Docs format (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets and presentations).

Accessing your work files doesn’t require a connection to your internal office network. Nor do you need to email files to yourself, carry around a thumbdrive, or use a company network drive – you can access your files using Google Docs from any web-enabled computer.

Combined with shared folders in Google Docs, the upload feature is a great way to collaborate on files with coworkers and external parties. Instead of using cumbersome email attachments, you can upload files to a folder and share it with coworkers, who can then access and edit the files from a single place. You can even have your sales team securely share contracts with external clients for review.

Premier Edition users can also use the Google Docs List API to upload files to Google Docs, or purchase applications offered by third parties based on this API that enable you to migrate and sync your files to Google Docs. These include:

Memeo Connect for Google Apps, a new desktop application that offers an easy way to access, migrate, and synchronize files to Google Docs across multiple computers. (PC and Mac).

Syncplicity which offers businesses automated back-up and file management with Google Docs. (PC)

Manymoon an online project management platform that makes it simple to organize and share tasks and documents with coworkers and partners, including uploading files to Google Docs.

Google has said that “in the coming months, we will enable Google Apps Premier Edition customers to purchase additional storage for $3.50/GB/yr (or €3.00/gb/yr in the EU).”

While the announcement is good news for all Google App users, in the GoggleGazer’s tests, only the files in a single directory can be uploaded at one time. Subdirectories aren’t easily supported. The release is only a few days old, and it will undoubtedly become more robust. Those who just can’t wait can check out the free option in Syncplicity (which is limited to a single user, 2 GB of storage and two computers. The personal edition costs $15 per month and manages 50 GB on up to 5 computers.

A product launched recently in Google Labs, Fusion Tables is a free service for sharing and visualizing data online. It allows you to upload data, share and mark up your data with collaborators, merge data from multiple tables, and create visualizations like charts and maps.”

“A well-chosen visualization can bring the data to life. Fusion Tables has automatic data visualization built in:” Google has integrated it with the Google Maps API and the Google Visualization API so you can view your data in maps, motion charts, and graphs. “All of these can be embedded in your webpage, your Google Site, your blog…any Web page you want! The visualizations even update automatically as data is updated or corrected. Embed the visualization once, and the latest version will always be shown automatically.”

As the Google Announcement says, “Let other people help spot outliers and unexpected values in your dataset by linking them directly to data that is filtered, aggregated, and visualized for various angles of examination. Fusion Tables’ data discussion features help you gather feedback from your community.

Is your dataset active, always changing? Is it being collected right now on cell phones or websites? With the new Fusion Tables API, you can update and query your dataset in Fusion Tables programmatically, without ever logging in to the Fusion Tables website. The API means you can import data from whatever data source you may have, whether a text file or a full-powered data base. On the more exotic side, imagine you’re collecting data via survey software on GPS-enabled cell phones, as the Open Data Kit project is doing. Open Data Kit uses Google App Engine and the Fusion Tables API to instantly map locations of survey results.”

ReadWriteWeb has a long and detailed post on Google Fusion Tables here. It’s well worth a read.

Karen Hawthorne says, “No question: Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to create a search tool that would find the most relevant Web page first. If someone typed in “New York Yankees,” for example, the official Yankees site would be the first result returned. Their algorithm, created back in their dorm days at Stanford, analyzed the “back links” in a hypertext document, or how many times other sites linked to it — the more links, the higher the relevancy of the page. It worked, transforming the way people find information. Google grew exponentially during 2001, becoming a verb in its own right.”

“As the Daily Beast sums up:

Commerce, advertising, video, mapping, email — Google changed them all. On a list heavy with superlatives, nobody used their brains for greater impact on how we lived, worked, and came to know things.”

Read more:

Kara Swisher wrote in “Boom Town,” her column in D | All Things Digital., that Google has been eyeing Trulia, a real estate search site, and competitor to Zillow.

Trulia Real Estate Search

Trulia’s valuation is said to be between $150 million and $200 million. Google has completed six transactions recently, spending a total of $1 billion, and Reuters has reported that Google CEO Eric Schmidt sees one small acquisition a month.. Meanwhile, talks for Google to acquire Yelp for  $550 million plus earnouts seem to have broken down. Everyone assumes there was another bidder (Apple? Microsoft?), but it seems that Google is not interested in a bidding war, and so far, nothing more has been said publicly.

Katherine Boehret, Walt Mossberg’s sidekick at the Wall Street Journal favorably reviewed Trulia lasr February.

Peter Kafka predicts that Google has its eye on Invite Media, MediaMath, DataXu, x+1, Turn andAppNexus. He notes that “Michael Rubenstein, who was running Google’s AdX service until its launch, left the company to join AppNexus earlier this fall.)

Google, not known for much promotion to the general public is heavily promoting Google Chrome in London. As reported in the Google Operating System Blog, and reported by the London Daily Mirror, a giant calendar is projected onto the wall of a shopping centre in London. Here’s the video.