Dear Google, What’s Wrong With You?

Dear Google: What’s wrong?

I ask because last weekend, while in San Francisco, I asked Google Maps for “hot chocolate mission” and was promptly directed to an ARCO station in Fremont, 40 miles away.

Similarly, last month I searched for “coffee” while in the Embarcadero Center, one of the denser coffee hotspots in America, and was sent to a Starbucks more than two miles away. And it hasn’t escaped my notice that you keep highlighting faraway places with Zagat listings over much closer places without.

Now, sure, if you’re thinking “hey, you’re just abusing your position as a highfalutin tech columnist to make anecdotal complaints here!” well, you’re not entirely wrong. Perk of the position.

What can I say? But Google Docs won’t save documents, the new Gmail interface still feels like a big step backwards, Gmail Offline keeps crashing on me, Google Hangouts hangs whenever we try to combine text chat and video and for what it’s worth, it’s not just me who’s wondering what’s gone wrong:

Don’t misunderstand. I’ve long been one of your bigger fans. Sure, I complained: “Google is in serious decline” a few years ago, but you’ve managed to turned your mighty aircraft carrier around quite nicely since. Stock at record heights, etc., etc., etc.

I don’t think you’re in decline now. Quite the opposite: I think in certain domains you’ve become so dominant that you’ve grown complacent. In fields where you’ve got real competition e.g. Android, Chrome you’re as incisive and innovative as ever.

Google+ isn’t exactly setting the world on fire, but it’s probably become an asset rather than a hindrance. And the ambition of Google Glass and your crazy moon-shot stuff like balloon-powered global Internet and self-driving cars (oh, yeah, and immortality) remains awesome.

The problem is that in certain fields you hardly need to compete any more. I mean, who competes with Google Maps? Oh, there are plenty of competitors, but who actually competes? Even mighty Apple is perceived as dramatically inferior (although Apple Maps has improved by leaps and bounds since its balky launch.) As for Bing Maps, and Nokia’s There, and OpenStreetMaps et al. forget about it.

So if you want to highlight all things Zagat since you acquired them, and downplay all others, who’s going to stop you, right? I mean, you sent me to a gas station 40 miles away for hot chocolate, and I just shook my head and took it in stride.

It would be way too much work to install and familiarize myself with an entirely different map app, when you’re usually mostly good enough. (Also, to be fair, after I complained about you on Twitter, a friend who’s a Google employee directed me to Cafe St. Jorge, so I can’t rule out the possibility that you were just playing the long and subtle game.)

Same with your bread-and-butter search. Even if Bing was better and I don’t for a moment believe that it is who’s actually going to the trouble to find that out? I’d have to compare a multitude of different searches to figure out whether I should switch, and that’s way too much work in this modern world.

As long as you’re perceived as good enough, you don’t actually need to get any better. Maybe you will anyways, out of the goodness of your heart, or, more accurately, your aesthetic hunger for purity and perfection but you won’t be pushed there. So of course you slow down and get sloppy.

It’s not really your fault, Google; it’s the fault of your would-be competitors. So, what the heck, since they can’t seem to get their collective act together, why not go building barges instead of polishing products? I bet it’s a lot more fun.

But Google, be careful. IBM grew dominant and became complacent. Microsoft grew dominant, and became complacent. And look what happened to them.

Okay, fine, so they’re still immensely profitable megacorporations, but they lost the initiative, they no longer dictate the conversation, they’re not the ones who build the future any more; they just come and mop up after it’s built.

That is not the Google way. But you’re pretty huge these days, arguably bloated, and middle-aged for a tech company and while your numbers are great, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business.

I’m not saying all is lost. Far from it. I’m just saying that, where everyone else seems to see a dominant unstoppable machine, I think I see some distant early warning signs. I hope you see them, too. (Yoogle) (techcrunch) (GNN)

Google’s Barges Likely Glass Exhibition Spaces, Lease Indicates

The furor over Google’s mystery barges in San Francisco and Portland has reached a fever pitch over the past week. According to our sources the various reports about the barges being showcases for Google’s Glass retail efforts are correct.

Today, a report by The Los Angeles Times’ Chris O’Brien notes that most of the reporters going after this barge story have been looking at the wrong San Francisco lease.

O’Brien notes that the correct lease’s purpose is the “fabrication of a special event structure and art exhibit only and for no other purpose.”

The sources we spoke to were still uncertain about the exact uses that all of the barges would be put to in the end, but aiding Google in showcasing Glass for its eventual retail run is the likeliest fate of the units docked behind San Francisco’s Treasure Island.

A story from CBS KPIX yesterday, which we mentioned earlier today, outlined a luxury showroom with a ‘party deck’ up top and spaces below for retail stores that could showcase Glass and other Google products. This report was said to be ‘pretty accurate’ by our sources.

The barges are composed of shipping containers stacked together, with cutouts that have had large bay windows put in place and then covered up.

The shipping container is already a favored construction block of Google, which has used them for years to house data centers that can be easily expanded.

The rationale behind using containers in this instance is that the barges likely won’t be a permanent home for the showcases, which could theoretically be disassembled and moved wherever Google needs them to be, on land or sea.

Lack of retail stores in which to demonstrate Glass effectively and publicly has always been a concern with regards to making the head-mounted computers available widely at retail. In my time with Glass, it became incredibly evident that people had no idea what they really did, how to use them or what the value proposition was.

Poor demo conditions in many places that I showed them to other people limited them to what amounted to a head-mounted video camera. A proper mis-en-scène for Glass will be all-important for having people ‘get’ the thing, and apparently Google is working to provide just that.

News of the barges, which are being built by a shell company called ‘Buy and Large Llc‘ (an apparent Wall-E reference) was broken widely by Cnet last week, which speculated that they could be water-borne data centers. But, O’Brien notes, this report is actually chasing the wrong lease, one that was signed on August 1st, while work on the Google barge began last year.

A report from The Verge this week noted that the Treasure Island barge will likely be towed across to Fort Mason for display once it’s completed.

The Portland Press Herald, which published the image above, snuck out to get some close-up shots of the one at Rickers Wharf this week.

Bing Renews Its Firehose Deal With Twitter

Microsoft today announced that it has renewed its partnership with Twitter, giving Bing access to all of the public content Twitter’s users create.

The terse three-sentence announcement is short on details, but a Microsoft spokesperson told us it extends, for an unspecified amount of time, the deal the two companies made four years ago.

“The past four years partnering with Twitter have been great, and we’re excited to continue that relationship in order to help deliver the best possible search experience,” the spokesperson told us.

Unlike Google, Bing has made social search a cornerstone of its strategy. Its close relationship with Facebook has long given it the ability to highlight posts from the popular social network, as well as from Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Foursquare, Klout and other services in its social sidebar.

With Bing’s latest redesign, which dropped the number of columns on its search results pages from three to two, the social sidebar now features even more prominently on the site.

Twitter itself started giving access to its public firehose feed to partners in 2010, and it continues to keep a very tight grip on who gets access to this information.

It’s providing a full feed to large partners like Microsoft, Google and others, though a small number of select resellers like Gnip and DataSift can provide anybody with the right resources (both financial and technical) with access to this data.