Google's Love For Small Businesses 318
bariswheel writes "The Fearless Frog is at it again: In his latest post, Cringely aims to slap some sense into Microsoft, Apple, and IBM altogether. From the article: 'What counts is that for Microsoft the platform is the PC while for Google the platform is the Internet and nobody can hope to control the Internet -- not Microsoft OR Google. Google is making a ton of money from people [small/medium sized businesses] who never were even in business before. This is not only a fundamental change in how advertising is done; it is a fundamental change in how BUSINESS is done.'"
old ways... (Score:5, Insightful)
So what's antiquated about making a product and selling it? Sure it's been done for a 1000s of years but that doesn't mean it's outdated... people will be doing exactly the same in the next 1000 years
The shortsightedness of America (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obsession with small business (Score:5, Insightful)
Walk into any big corporation and you find a bunch of uptight, miserable people who hate their jobs; don't care whether the customer is happy, and generally feel powerless to effect positive change on any grand scale within their operation.
There are obviously exceptions. Companies like Whole Foods treat their employees right, but these corporations are very atypical. Walk into a Wal-Mart and see if any employee there really gives a crap whether you find what you're looking for.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. It's also a fallacy that smaller companies don't employee more people. There are millions and millions of Americans working for small companies or self-employed. They are an intregal part of the workforce in the country.
Re:Obsession with small business (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obsession with small business (Score:4, Insightful)
Never mind that... (Score:3, Insightful)
For the sake of argument, let's put aside the total absence of numbers in that paragraph... But, if one company is going to be credited with "making a ton of money from people who never were even in business before", surely it's E-Bay!
Re:Obsession with small business (Score:1, Insightful)
It's not that small businesses are *bad*, it's that, truly, they do all the same evil things that BIG businesses do, just on a smaller scale.
I've worked for quite a few small businesses, and they all paid their employees poorly, didn't offer any health insurance, and overworked everyone instead of hiring more employees. Why? Because the owners were keeping all the money to themselves so they could be wealthy. And, being a small business, there just wasn't enough money to go around to pay the employees any kind of decent wage, or provide any benefits.
Don't even get me started on small businesses that are nothing but retail shops. Why should I pay more for a product at some "mom and pop" store just so "mom and pop" don't have to get real jobs? Screw them.
What does cringely see as Apple's "platform"? (Score:5, Insightful)
It surely is. That was obvious in 2000 when they came out with "Pocket PC", their most successful spin on the handheld, and "Stinger", their fialed attempt to get into the cellphone market.
The Pocket PC meant the end of the Windows CE micro-notebooks and the Windows-CE-based tablets. They were pushing Windows NT as the new tablet... the problem is that while Windows CE felt like a spin on Windows 95, and the Pocket PC felt like a Palm on steroids, the Tablet PC was just an overpriced notebook.
Luckily for Microsoft, Palm had no idea what their product was, and has been trying to turn Palm OS into Pocket PC... and failing, big time. If Palm was smart they'd be selling black-and-white 68000-based Palms for $30-$50 in every grocery store in the USA, and they'd still own the business... because Microsoft couldn't do that. But, no...
But, anyway... Microsoft's platform is Windows. If you're not Windows... even if you look like Windows, Microsoft just wants to make you an annex to the Windows desktop. And if you don't even look like Windows, Microsoft doesn't want you to be a platform. That's why they completely redid the XBox, people were turning it into a platform.
But what's Apple's "platform"? It's not the Mac, and it's not Mac OS, or Mac OS X, because their "handheld/..." is the iPod, and it's nothing like a Mac. It's not even tied in to the Mac. Apple's platform is, near as I can tell, "whatever they can make money selling". That's not something they can control like Microsoft can control Windows. Microsoft isn't Apple's proxy, but what is?
Re:old ways... (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally think we'd all be better off if everybody would do a little less selling and a little more making. Okay, a lot less and a lot more.
word? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Obsession with small business (Score:2, Insightful)
That's now an oxymoron if you ask me.
How many "big corporations" are really successful? You can't name one big corporation that isn't either playing "voodoo accounting" to pretend they're successful, or has a shitload of oppressed employees they're taking advantage of. 99.9% of the "big successful corporations" are a half-inch away from completely imploding upon themselves. Have you had your head under a rock for the last decade or what? Read the news lately bro?
Re:Obsession with small business (Score:5, Insightful)
That is only an issue because of the dismal state of healthcare in this country. That is a serious problem that needs to be addressed on its own. Most industrialized "first world" countries provide healthcare for their citizens; don't blame the small businessman for the failings of government.
It seems to me that people have just automatically assumed that larger businesses are bad (by associating them with some bad actors among the super-big actors) and that smaller business are somehow intrinsically "good,"...
It's not a matter of "good" or "bad". The problem with large businesses is that they have a disproportionate amount influence on our lives. They own congress and rig the laws and tax code to favor them. They coldly lay off workers without remorse. They are large institutions who are beholden to no one but their shareholders. They do these things, not because they are "evil", but because they can. Any business, small or large, will do what it can to make money, it's just that some of the things large businesses are capable of are pretty nasty.
Small businesses are a part of the community, and have a human face. They're "one of us". Despite their relative inefficiancy, it is no surprise that people have a warmer opinion of them than their larger counterparts.
A need for both (Score:4, Insightful)
While it is wonderful that ebay and Google are offering large scale exposure and nation wide distrabution to small businesses, let's not demonize all giant corporations. Some things are better done on a huge scale. Think Boeing and FedEx. While other things are best done on a small,even personal,scale. Like fine dining or health care. The real hope for America is finding the appropirate scale for different industries, instead of business success being defined as becoming a huge market-dominating multinational, success can become about a balanced harmonious place in the economy and community.
Certainly Agree With Him in Parts (Score:3, Insightful)
Google funds its activities and development through advertising and spin-offs based on that from the services they provide, provided by their development. Small businesses and individuals have got several times the chance of using Google Calendar or Google Groupware than they have of using Exchange. That's what makes them a bit dangerous to Microsoft. Even then though, Microsoft still makes its money through licensing. There's no real way of getting around that.
Ditto with open source software, and that's why it will not be brought to the masses by Red Hat or especially Novell. They charge license fees in all but name. If someone can find a way of taking open source software, and finds a business model that allows them to fund their development whilst giving it away for free, it's bye, bye Microsoft, Novell and a few other companies who make their livings from pure software licensing. Seriously. IBM are a little bit different in that they do more than just that, so they have a chance. There I disagree. But, if you're a pure software licensing company you better hope damn hard that you're providing an adequate service to your custoners and you're in a specific well defined market.
IBM???Apple??? (Score:2, Insightful)
Um, IBM makes its money through enterprise-level applications and services, with some hardward. Apple plays the hardware/music/software game. You may as well "slap some sense" into Boston Market, Sears, and Starbucks for not joining Google's model.
Re:Well, both use one product to support another (Score:2, Insightful)
I see many distros of linux being sold in many computer stores (and pre-installed on machines). Just because Microsoft is the most popular at this time, doesn't make them a monopoly. Nothing is stopping you from creating an OS and selling it.
The same thing with apple. There are 100s of companies out there selling mp3 players (proving it is not a monopoly). Apple just happens to be the most popular.
We shouldn't punish companies for being successful.
Re:old ways... (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought the world economy has been more about services than products for decades now. Software businesses are waking up to this fact, after some time of distortion (mostly due to Microsoft) in which they wanted to sell copies of bits as products. I don't really mind this, as I can save tons of money by serving myself (using Free software).
Exactly, Are you just a Cog, or a Human? (Score:5, Insightful)
People in town know me, and I know them. The people who run the other small bussinesses in town all know me, and I know them.
With a relatively small number of customers, I have to treat them right, or we'd be out of bussiness really really fast.
When I do treat the customer right, I know that they'll tell their friends... and I also know that the other small bussinesses in town will stear people my way, just like I send bussiness their way.
Occasionally, I'll get customers who are complete assholes. Over a certain level of assholeness, and they're not worth my time or trouble... and I make certain to send them off to some large corporate store so I can concentrate on the customers who actually respond to being treated well.
The customers I want, I treat like gold.
Now, take your typical corporate environment. The workers could give a fark about their customers, because almost none of the workers in a corporate environment have a direct stake in how well the bussiness does overall (beyond making sure that it doesn't go belly up).
Your typical corporate employee treats the customers at a certain minimum level of service, because he'll be fired if he doesn't.
So, EVERYONE who goes to do bussiness with the corporate places gets treated in a "lowest common denominator" sort of way. They're not quite treated as badly as garbage that blew in off the street, but they're never treated like the "good" customers that I treat like gold.
Everyone in the corporate places, employees and customers alike, gets treated as just another cog in a big machine.
So, if you spend your money at big corporate places, you're in effect voting with your dollars to be treated just slightly better than assholes get treated. But, if you spend your money at small bussinesses and act like a decent human being, then you'll be treated much better.
Every dollar you spend at Wallmart or Blockbuster, is a dollar that you're "voting" with, to be treated as a disposable nothing who gets the bare minimum of courtesy... and nothing else.
I guess if you're a complete asshole, then you'd come out ahead in that bargain
Re:Obsession with small business (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that you can't be a crappy manager at a small business, and stay in business long.
Big businesses depend on economies of scale that don't exist in small businesses... there isn't ROOM for an incompetent boob in a three-man operation.
You get to three-hundred, and, "Well, Johnson may be a bullying misogynist, but at least he shows up for work."
You get to three-thousand, and Johnson's bullying misogyny is percieved as "leadership".
Re:old ways... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm fine with services too -- some people need them. I don't, usually. You can even think of them as a product. The problem is, instead of trying to build the best widget or offer the best service, almost everybody seems to be intent on making something that's just good enough and then differentiate themselves through marketing.
So I end up paying not only for a mediocre product but for the marketing as well. Marketing has a negative value to me (it uses my time and annoys me) so it actually detracts from the product, yet in many cases I have no alternatives to paying positive cash for it.
Please stop... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:old ways... (Score:5, Insightful)
Better watch out... one of these days those far off lands are going to realize that they hold all the cards.
Re:Well, both use one product to support another (Score:5, Insightful)
And there are things stopping others from selling products in markets which ms has a monopoly in, ms abusing it's monopoly, which they have been convicted of.
Microsoft's business model is in transition (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile they'll still be selling desktop software of course, but this area will start to decline in profitability. Windows and Office are their cash cows and the software-as-service stuff is their new direction which will eat cash for a number of years.
As far as Cringely's suggestion that MS offers a lean and mean, high performance, secure version of Windows, fully compatible with XP applications and peripherals, that could be sold for $49 without major loss of revenue and internal disruption, well, would that it were that easy. That's Cringely's advantage of being a blogger.
Re:Well, both use one product to support another (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:old ways... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well, both use one product to support another (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe that both the US Government and the EU would disagree with you about Microsoft not being a monopoly.
Re:What does cringely see as Apple's "platform"? (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean "Palm m100"?
No, I don't mean a $150 68000 device with 2M running palmOS 3.5 in 2000, when it was the replacement for the Palm IIIe and contemporary with the Visor and the original Clie.
I mean they should have maintained the PalmOS 4 68000 based line and let the price drop and the capacity increase as the cost of memory and chips fell. They didn't have to enhance it and come out with a PalmOS 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, just keep making the black-and-whote DragonBall-EZ based Palms with 8M RAM and selling them as cheaply as they could.
Here's what they did:
2000 - Palm m100 - 2M - $150.
2002 - Palm Zire - 2M - $100.
2004 - Palm Zire 21 - ARM-based, 16M - $100
2006 - Palm Z22 - ARM-based, color - $100
here's what they should have done:
2000 - Palm m100 - 2M - $150.
2002 - Palm Zire - 2M- $100.
2004 - (Palm z100) - 8M - $70.
2006 - (Palm Mini) - 8M - $40.
They got down to $100 and stuck there, adding power that the entry level doesn't need, upgrading the screen and processor and memory instead of pushing the price down and going after the grocery stor checkout lines and the educational market until every high school student had one instead of a Ti-83 or whatever this year's sine-qua-non calculator is.
Re:Obsession with small business (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure beats letting the market determine who recieves care. Here, the rich get vanity surgery and specialists for everything, while the poor are treated only in the emergency room. From a humanitarian standpoint, our system is a failure.
Google is approaching a monopoly. (Score:2, Insightful)
Suppose that Google had 95% of the search market. Then, if Google either denies advertising space to a small company or lowers its page ranking (so that the company appears at the bottom of a list of 666 other businesses selling the same product), then the company could be hurt irrevocably. There is no viable way for the company to use an alternative search portal since since its tiny search of the search market reaches too small an audience. "Too small an audience" means "too few potential customers".
Re:Visual studio, anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Obsession with small business (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't have free-market health care in the United States. Heck, we are literally a stone throw away at implementing socialized medicine in the United States. The high cost of health care is due to the cartelization and licensing of doctors and medicine, as well as government regulations. In fact, the US government spends more per capita on health care than even Cuba (communism's current trademark) does. Read here to see what the AMA has done to health care, as well as this article [fff.org], which describes how the United States's health care is anything but free-market.
I agree that our health care situation is bad, but the last thing that we need is socialized medicine. We need to move away from socialism. Socialism is a mistake of the 20th century, and it is best that we finally use free-market ideas.
Re:Google is approaching a monopoly. (Score:1, Insightful)
This is what pisses me off about the US.
SO FREAKING WHAT?
Oh, helpless companies can't make money! The big companies will squash them down like a bug!
Get over it!
Companies are all out there to make money, WE "the people" are all out there to make money.
I remember when there was a time that everyone I knew (including myself) used Yahoo!, but look at things now.. 2 guys from a freaking garage beat them and formed Google.
I think this whole anti-trust and anti-competitive crap is standing behind companies who can't create anything innovative nor know how to compete.
Like it or not, the market is a war-zone, and if you're good enough you will survive and get to the top.
Re:Well, both use one product to support another (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft have had their monopoly status confirmed by the US courts, and I think the EU confirmed it as well. That's why they get special rules applied to the way they do things. Lucky Microsoft.
Bundling is a real issue for Microsoft, but a non-issue for Apple. The reason Apple can bundle all it likes is that it's not a monopoly player in the computer world, so the special rules that Microsoft must follow do not bind Apple.
Re:old ways... (Score:2, Insightful)
And that is they are inefficent in the sense that Google simply makes a dallor off something as simple as click on a web browser and not so much a company relying on so many factors to do with various other technical aspects.
Microsofts method of making money boils down to centrally two software packages, the Windows OS and Micorsoft Office. These two applications are MS's core products and no other software package that they have come out with makes anything close to these two applications.
Googles method of making money, Adwords. Banner clicking advertisment.
So whats the difference between the two really aside from the fact they do completely different tasks? Nothing, they both address fairly similar markets. Small to Mid to Large Businesses.
The process of turning over a dallor in Googles view
a) has very little to almost absolutly no cost to google
b) doesnt require dependancy of other computer related companys to "jump on the band wagon" so-to-speak
c) no r&d
d) no security patches need to be applied every 2 weeks
The only thing google realy depends on is that people use them, Again its come down to who was there first and who grabbed the general market at the time with a really sellable product that worked for the masses. How can microsoft really hate them for that, its exactly what they did to get rich
Re:old ways... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:old ways... (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft, Apple, et al...all have a focus towards their particular platforms, while Google uses something more broad and far reaching, albeit more powerful, to touch and affect all regardless of platform.
Re:old ways... (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you even read the article? Neither Microsoft nor Apple are merely in the business of making products and selling them. They make platforms that they dominate. Every other MP3 player company was just making products; Apple is up to something different.
my only problem with Google and small biz (Score:4, Insightful)
This is monopoly Microsoft could only dream of.
Re:Google is approaching a monopoly. (Score:4, Insightful)
What do you mean by "make money" anyway? "Acquire money, in return for work"? I got news for you, not all people are like that. Some don't want to accquire money. And some don't want to do anything in return for getting money, and that can just as well apply to corporations. **cough**sco**cough**
If we didn't have pro free market legislation, google would not have gotten where it is today, microsoft or some company allied with it would have taken the market or at least a significant chunk of it by any dirty trick it could use.
Re:Obsession with small business (Score:3, Insightful)
While we do have some government interference in food prices, primarily in the form of food stamps and farm subsidies, for the most part, grocery stores operate according to market forces. It's a system that works. The US poor are better fed than in any other time in history. The problems we have with malnutrition for some segments of the poor are caused by bad education (which happens to be a centralized socialized good distributed by the government).
Re:old ways... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since buying a piece of $350 software from a company that screwed me pretty hard (refusing to let me move it to a new machine without buying and using a *^%^%* dongle---a rule that was -not- in any contract I agreed to when I bought the product---and in theory, not allowing me to sell the product to anyone else), I now read licensing agreements and will never as long as I live buy any software from that particular company again. They know who they are (as do the folks on every audio recording message board on which I regularly post).
That said, the very fact that I feel like I have to read multi-page agreements from top to bottom to keep from getting utterly screwed over by greedy companies is a pretty sure sign that government intervention in the software industry is desperately needed. As long as software licenses can violate the right of first sale and other basic consumer rights, commercial software is not a product, it's a service at best, a screw job at worst, and a wonderful reason to support FLOSS on the whole.
Not that all software companies behave like children, mind you, and one would hope that eventually the free market would destroy the ones that do... but that doesn't help the innocent people who get screwed in the process. :-)
Re:Obsession with small business (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not the MBA that makes people insensitive selfish short term profit thinking clods, it just makes them better at being such clods. You have to start that way to begin with is the point I'm making.
Most MBA programs try to infuse a sense of responsibility into their students. A company that pursue's short term profits at the expense of long term planning is not something that is being run by a sucessful MBA. A company that hires people who neglect the human and social capital in the pursuit of increasing revenues will eventually decline as people move on and leave.
Don't allow your personal experience to negatively affect your thoughts on all MBAs. Maybe you had a bad experience with an individual who was an insensitive clod and was also an MBA, but that doesn't mean that going to school to learn how to manage people and business factors is a waste or time, or that hiring those people is equally as short sighted. Perhaps you were cut by someone who had an MBA? Cutting an unprofitable anchor isn't the same as focusing on profits to the detriment of the company...it lets the company grow faster.
From my personal experience, 'small businesses' make the wrong decisions all to often and keep doing the same thing because they have to and don't know how to change. It's hard to look at something you love and have built and acknowedge that it's failing, or at the least, failing to perform. An MBA can't fix that, but they can help by asking hard questions and directing the company to perform in ways that they've been taught will increase productivity. MBA's aren't evil, but maybe what they have to do is evil. For the record, I own a small business and am getting an MBA.
Who knows...maybe you'll enlighten us a bit more on your personal experiences to help everyone understand why MBAs are evil.
Re:Obsession with small business (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know why I'm surprised that this got modded up, but you really need to get out some. Are some people with MBAs worthless know-nothings? Of course. As are some people with every certification or degree known to man. It doesn't impugn the value of that education.
More and more, Slashdot seems to be sliding towards the groupthink that "People who are interested in business are bad." You know what? You can be a dynamite engineer with a fantastic development group and a kick-ass product. But if your salesforce can't sell, your management can't keep the company focused, your CFO can't get the financials straight (including making good decisions regarding cash flows and investments to make sure that you, the kick-ass engineer, gets paid every month), your product doesn't mean shit. Because it will never see the market.
Re:New Rules (Score:3, Insightful)
You would have to relocate the main offices all somewhere such as Detroit(or somewhere in the Midwest/Rust Belt), and remove the exclusionism in their culture - the most obvious example of it is the Stanford Nexus II [orkut.com] product.
Only when you have removed the culture of excluding on a whim, is when you can start believing that what intelligence that exists at Google is doing something Not Evil. Anything else is a corporate "Animal House" with hollow friendliness mixed in.
You are asking for a tall order there, sir. If it happens, there will certainly be some that would think that it'd be on the decline that they do this. Somehow I doubt it.
Re:Big versus Small (Score:1, Insightful)
Additionally, there is more likely to be a better "work/life" balance as well, since those "at the top" aren't all that far from those actually performing the work.
I've heard an interesting remark about game theory and management theory: "Leadership is about maximizing gains, management about minimizing losses" which even included the comment that management/accountability in a large corporation is a good example of being "on the defensive".
Finally, large corporations usually have flaws in their feedback mechanisms; while management is supposed to be top-down, the whole function of management memos reporting results back up the food chain seem to specialize in NOT giving useful information. Information theory goes awry since management wants to hear the "expected" rather than anything unexpected. This, IIRC, is called "politics".