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There is a good argument to be made that Google is a more influential company than Apple, but this article doesn't present it. Once you take away the unsubstant
by wzdd 15y ago
There is a good argument to be made that Google is a more influential company than Apple, but this article doesn't present it. Once you take away the unsubstantiated (at least in the article) fluff, such as "Google preaches openness because it benefits the company", here are Google's concrete accomplishments, according to the article:
1) Their core technology, Google search.
2) The fact that they bought YouTube.
This isn't a very compelling summary of Google's concrete accomplishments, and I'm sure a much better one could be made. Even Google Docs is a better example of Google changing the way people communicate than "they bought YouTube". (YouTube itself is, of course, amazing, but they were established and very popular before Google, a fact that doesn't really fit the narrative as presented.)
The worst part of this article, however, is that it presents Apple's accomplishments as inevitable and Google's as miraculous, when you could just as easily argue the reverse. "Someone would inevitably have bought YouTube -- surely the fact that anybody can now share videos on the Internet is inevitable?" And the answer is, yes, someone would have, but the point is that Google did. In the same way, everybody can see, in hindsight, that the iTunes music store was inevitable, but Apple was the company to make it happen. Being first is only easy in retrospect.
- tdfx 15y agoI agree. Someone would've "eventually" improved on Excite, Yahoo, and AltaVista's search. Someone would've "eventually" purchased YouTube. The argue that the author uses against Apple applies equally or more-so to every point he makes about Google.
- dy 15y agoI just recently found out that Robin (the CEO of Baidu) was also working on algorithms similar to Pagerank. It changed my perception of Google as a brilliant once-in-a-lifetime flash of insight to much more "the idea was in the air" and these guys rocked the execution.
- runn1ng 15y agoExactly. The author's argument with "It would happen anyway" can directly be applied to Google, too.
- Keyframe 15y agoI'd throw in Gmail too.
- quanticle 15y agoThe inevitability argument can be made for YouTube, but I don't think it can be made for Google search. Remember, before the PageRank algorithm, people thought Internet search was a dead end. The leading search providers were continuing to push pure boolean queries; an approach that was quickly becoming unsustainable under the mass of spam that was starting to exploit text-relevance metrics. Google's use of link-based popularity metrics was truly revolutionary, in that it wasn't apparent by simply extrapolating existing trends in Internet search engines.
- Volt 15y ago>The inevitability argument can be made for YouTube, but I don't think it can be made for Google search. I think it can. Around the time that PageRank was published, Jon Kleinberg also published the HITS (hubs & authorities) algorithm. There are some key differences in the way they work, and Page & Brin smartly went on to found Google around PageRank, but it was becoming evident in that period that hyperlink-based ranking was a smart thing to do.