Image via WikipediaFacebook is the most serious competition Google ever faced, and Facebook is not your classic search engine, it is not a ten blue links company. Although it is blue!
Look at how Facebook has gone after Google by not going after Google like one bull after another. The web as a whole is too fluid a place, too open to innovation for any company to manage to pull a monopoly on there.
Image via WikipediaThe inbox continues to be the wild, wild west of the computing experience. Email is still the dominant application. Before Google came along, the feeling was search was done and over with. That is why Yahoo refused to buy Google, despite being given the chance by the Google founders. Yahoo already had a search box. Why bother? AltaVista was king.
It is not possible the inbox is done and over with, even though the last major innovation with the inbox was when Google gave one gigabyte of space, and that too on April Fool's day. You had to see it to believe it.
Is it like when you borrow too many books from the library and do not get around to reading them all? Whose fault is that? Your having only 24 hours in your day is not the tech sector's problem. That perhaps is not even God's problem.
Google did a good job of expanding your inbox. And the search function in Gmail is great. And the newly launched Priority Inbox is great too. But the inbox has a long way to go. Your social graph is made up of concentric circles and your inbox has to reflect that. Not all emails are equally important.
There has to be the option to visually read emails. So you collect all emails from this one person and you visually read 100 of them at once. You should have the option to form word clouds out of those 100 emails with the option to jump over to an individual email from that word cloud, if the desire should take wings.
Fred Wilson: The Impact Of Priority Inbox: I get a lot of email and I can't get to all of it regardless of what email client I use. Other Priority Inbox users might actually read through Everything Else. But I don't and can't. ..... Google has solved a huge problem for me and potentially created a huge problem for emailers.
So how do you get hold of a celebrity like Fred Wilson? You tweet them. You leave a comment at their blog. If it is worth their time to read, they will read. They might even tweet back, or reply to a comment. But don't be counting on it. It is not like you have a right to his time, especially when he also has only 24 hours in a day.
Before there was Google, there was Yahoo. Before there was MSN, there was Yahoo. The starry-eyed Google founders did make a serious attempt to sell off to Yahoo back in the days. But Yahoo was not interested. Yahoo already had a search box, and search was thought of only one of many things netizens wish to do. The action was elsewhere. Search was nowhere close to a central function that it is thought of today. Back then AltaVista was the search king, and Yahoo was good enough.
A few years after Google tried to get sold off to Yahoo, Sergei Brin would go on dates, and he noticed there were not too many second dates. I don't know if this story is true, but Larry Page said it somewhere. This was in 2000 when dot coms were crashing left and right, especially dot coms that did not have any revenue whatsoever, like Google at the time.
Bill Gates did make an attempt to buy Google. Buy it "at any price," he ordered his lieutenants. This was perhaps a year or two before they went public, or maybe even right after. This time around the Google founders knew better than to sell.
But search just kept getting bigger and bigger. Google became the sexy company, always in news. In a scramble Microsoft made an attempt to buy Yahoo. What actually happened after that offer was made is murky story. Jerry Yang has been hammered with the story that he refused an offer he should not have refused, especially with where Yahoo stands today in the market. Jerry says he did mean to take it, but when he went for it, Microsoft was no longer interested. Then they came back saying they just want Yahoo's search business. Yahoo minus its search would not be a Yahoo no more. A portal like Yahoo without a search engine?
Google is search king. The competition is not arithmetic where if MSN search and Yahoo search were to get together they would eat away Google's market share. Challening Google search is an innovation challenge. But at this point Google's search business is so capital intensive, it is hard to imagine a startup that will come at it from behind.
Google might not get challenged by another search startup, more likely it will get challenged by a startup that finds another central internet application. Facebook comes to mind. Facebook is not search, it is not email, it is not shopping, it is a new application. I am not saying Facebook will grow bigger than Google. Search will stay a central application online. And I expect Google to keep innovating in that search space.
The next sexy company might not even be a dot com. It might not be a 2D company, a rectangle on a screen. Maybe all the key internet applications have already been found. Now you can just keep making it better and better and better. But perhaps there is no fundamental discovery to be made. I'd love to be proven wrong.
Jerry's two big career mistakes. He should have bought Google. He should have sold off to Microsoft. Ha.
Laptop Modem Demand to Drive Early WiMAX Device Shipments Teleclick.ca As Mobile WiMAX devices begin to hit the market, the bulk of early product shipments will be external USB modems and WiMAX cards built into portable computers ....... In-Stat expects annual WiMAX device shipments to break the 10 million mark in 2010 WiMAX: The next-gen net connectivity Merinews higher quality and almost no wiring. WiMAX has already found it space in Indian market ans is growing rapidly. ..... Presently, WiMAX technology is being used by Tata Communications Internet Services Ltd ( TCISL ) at several Metro cities to its broadband customers. Customers also have enthusiastic response towards its performance as they are not facing problem of interruption in service due to cable cut/damage problem. When a Rock Star CEO Leaves the Stage Washington Post Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976 but was ousted in a power struggle in 1985. ..... In late 1997, Jobs returned. ...... hitting nearly $200 per share in December 2007, from about $3 in 1997, adjusted for splits and dividends Quantum, Runcom Technologies Team to Develop Low Cost WiMAX Handsets TMCnet
Quantum Telecom has entered into an exclusive agreement with Runcom Technologies for the development, manufacturing and selling of ultra low cost (ULC) WiMAX (News - Alert) fixed and mobile handsets. ....... Recently, Runcom signed a framework agreement with ChinaTel for WiMAX deployment in 29 major cities across China, covering area of 300 million people.
Sprint’s WiMAX Deployments – Uphill Battle Gerson Lehrman Group, New York Possible DTV Delay Roils Mobile OperatorsPC World Faster wireless broadband in the U.S. may be held hostage to the already lengthy transition to digital TV if the deadline for shutting down analog broadcasts is pushed back ........ TV stations are required to move all their programming to digital channels after Feb. 17 as part of a process in which valuable frequencies in the 700MHz band will be turned over to mobile broadband providers. ....... The nation's two biggest mobile operators, Verizon Wireless and AT&T, both plan to use 700MHz spectrum for the next generation of mobile broadband, based on LTE (Long-Term Evolution) technology. ...... AT&T is using HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), which can deliver as much as 48Mb per second in the same size band ....... Before Sprint Nextel launched its first commercial WiMax network in Baltimore at the end of September 2008, it spent months building and testing the networks in its initial target cities. Sprint WiMax networks in two of those cities, Chicago and Washington, D.C., still aren't open for business. Wireless: The Outlook Gets Murkier for ClearwireBusinessWeek Last May some of the biggest names in the technology and media business, including Intel (INTC), Google (GOOG), Sprint (S), and Comcast (CMCSA), teamed up to invest $3.2 billion in the startup Clearwire (CLWR). ...... founded by entrepreneur Craig McCaw had high hopes of shaking up the wireless industry ...... Billions more in losses are projected for the coming years as Clearwire invests heavily to roll out its network. ......... the credit crunch could crimp Clearwire's ambitions. ....... The company needs to raise an additional $2 billion to $2.3 billion to reach its target of offering wireless broadband service in most of the top 100 U.S. markets by the end of 2010. Recession Comes to the PC Makers The fastest-growing segment of the market is so-called netbooks—stripped-down notebooks that cost $300 to $500 and deliver far less profit than standard notebooks. ........ Microsoft is said to get about $13 per copy for the Windows version that goes in netbooks, vs. more than $50 for those that go into standard PCs. ...... Acer operates with a super-lean Taiwanese cost structure that allows it to price its products aggressively. Apple seems content to stick with making ever-more-powerful PCs for premium prices. ..... Big Blue sidestepped the tumult by selling its PC business to Lenovo four years ago. IBM: Outsourcing at Home the U.S. economic downturn has already claimed more than 60,000 tech jobs in the past three months alone ........ With 200,000 service employees worldwide and nearly 80,000 in India, IBM ....... Dubuque and Iowa offered IBM an enticing package of incentives worth $55 million over 10 years. They include a loan of $11.7 million that will be forgiven if IBM fulfills its hiring pledge. Broadband Bill Disappoints Nearly Everyone $6 billion is not going to get you to ubiquitous broadband ...... pegged the cost of creating universal broadband in the tens of billions of dollars ........ $44 billion over three years. ...... "advanced" broadband will be defined as service of 45 megabits per second or higher, while "basic" broadband will be considered 5 Mbps Comstar Soft Launches WiMAX Network in Moscow WELT ONLINE, Germany
It might as well be Google itself, but there sure is a lot of room for search. The amount of data available online is just going to keep growing like crazy. Five of the six billion people are not yet online. And as they come online, companies are going to work to make it easier and easier for people to create data online, text, audio, video and more. So you are looking at more and more stuff, in more and more languages, in more and more formats, text, audio,video. And there is the perennial demand: the quality of search. Can you find what you are looking for? How precise is the result? How user friendly is the search experience?
Google's handicap for now is it only knows text. And even text it does not do as well as we might want, even though it does it better than anyone else.
When you search for something you want the most relevant webpages and sites to show up first. And you want to be able to search within sites. How to rank pages? Google started out by saying the more sites that link to your site, the more valuable it is. Well, maybe, but not if many of them are link farms. But that was a great way to start. That still has to be the basic formula. But then each site has to be given a weight of its own based on many different criteria.
The language challenge is a big one, as is the format challenge. Can a search engine "read" audio and video like it reads words? Can a search engine search content regardless of what language or format it might be in, and then present the same in the language of the end user's choosing? You are talking real time translation. That right there is a huge challenge. Major work will have to be done in speech software to make this possible.
The formula that a website's worth is how many other websites link to it is basically good. But the formula has to get more sophisticated than that. Not all links are equal. And each site should have a weight based on a few different things. So one link from a really good site should count for more than many links from so so sites. And the search engine should be able to count the page hits for each site in real time. The activity level of a site should be a major factor of how important a site is. As important as links.
And there is this real time thing. Say if I put out a new website or just a new page to an existing site, how long before the search engine finds it? Can it be an hour? A minute? Less? It should be less than a second. The reverse should also be true. If a site or a page is taken down, the search engine should know.
Language, content format, speech, website weightage based on links and page hits. These are some of the things that come to mind. This is enough homework for now.
Google might or might not deliver. There is plenty of room for others, especially for bold upstarts.
Image via WikipediaFacebook is the most serious competition Google ever faced, and Facebook is not your classic search engine, it is not a ten blue links company. Although it is blue! 
Image via WikipediaThe inbox continues to be the wild, wild west of the computing experience. Email is still the dominant application. Before Google came along, the feeling was search was done and over with. That is why Yahoo refused to buy Google, despite being given the chance by the Google founders. Yahoo already had a search box. Why bother? AltaVista was king. 
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