4 ms·
Is it failing? I think it's a little late for that question. More like "why did it fail?" I understand the nature of a company like Google is to cast your ne
by TomOfTTB 17y ago
Is it failing? I think it's a little late for that question. More like "why did it fail?"
I understand the nature of a company like Google is to cast your net wide, devote a small amount of resources to a bunch of products and hope some of them take off. That's what Knol is part of and that's fine. Google's mistake has been not improving or shutting it down before it became an embarrassment.
Given that I consider articles like this to be exactly the level of mockery they deserve.
- joe_the_user 17y agoAs giant corporations go, I like Google. Their business model mostly involves giving us more. Still, I am happy to see this "Wikipedia-killer" dead. Wikipedia is both great and terrible. It both "very unreliable" and about as reliable as one gets in any first blush look at given subject. Certainly, to many experts it is an embarrassment and, worse, a threat. But that's often as not because even expert opinion is divided in many fields and Wikipedia doesn't prevent well supported dissident opinion from being entirely suppressed. Certainly, no should quote Wikipedia in print without further research but it's a great place to start that research.
- tokenadult 17y agoGoogle's mistake has been not improving or shutting it down before it became an embarrassment. Yes. But there was probably too much corporate inertia to shut it down within forty-eight hours after it was opened to public posting, by which time it was a huge embarrassment.
- onreact-com 17y agoWhy did it fail? Paying people for UGC makes the wrong people contribute.