SNS: What Is XXVI (Alphabet) (Google)?

 

In This Issue Week of 01/22/2018 Vol. 23 Issue 3

FEATURE: What Is XXVI (Alphabet) (Google)? o   What Is Google? o   Google's Numbers o   What Is Advertising? o   Alphabet: The Algo Co o   Summary Quotes of the Week Takeout Window o   New Audio Technology from Google o   Flow and Interaction: The Reach of Complexity Upgrades o   Financials: Alphabet Is Google o   Chinese Buy Grindr Ethermail Inside SNS Upcoming SNS Events o   FiRe 2018 o   Where's Mark?

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Recommended Book
of the Week:

For those interested in what's really behind advertising, what Microsoft's Linda Stone (then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's aide de camp) called "Attention Management," from the person who coined the term "net neutrality": it's available here, at https://tinyurl.com/ybugq8eu

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What Is XXVI (Alphabet) (Google)?

Among the hundreds of interesting things about Google, there are three that stand out, to my mind:

1.     The company started as an algorithm, and made money by accident.

2.     Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided very early on to enable employees to use a fraction of their company-paid time for innovating.

3.     At a moment in history when global CEOs generally responded to threats from China with cupidity, fear, and greed, Google's founders showed moral courage and discipline, defying the Chinese Communist Party while protecting the longer-term security of its customers and shareholders.

In order to understand this interesting company, I found it worth asking the question of other large technology companies:

What do they stand for? What, for example, is Microsoft? What is Intel? Both companies are historic monopolists, now struggling on a strategic level, as their monopolies are eroding.

What is Amazon? A company that has decoded and perfected the nature of business models. If Amazon knows nothing about, say, organic food, it can buy the country's leader in that sector and run it better than the prior owners. I was asked last week at our TAG Predictions Northwest event, Where is Amazon headed? "To the sky," was my answer. Holding the keys to how to manage a business makes everything else possible.

What is Facebook? Probably the most intellectually dishonest large firm in the US, with the possible exception of Uber, and a proven serious threat to national security. (At the same above event, I said that I now believe, contrary to what we've been told by Mark Zuckerberg and the mainstream media, but in line with Facebook's own testing, that the results of both the US presidential election and the Brexit referendum had been changed by Russian and other foreign interference, largely through manipulation of  Facebook and Twitter accounts). (See "SNS: Computational Propaganda: A Fireside Conversation with Berit Anderson," Jan. 4, 2018.)

And what, for example, is Alibaba? A state-protected copy of a US company, nurtured by China and famous for selling counterfeit Western goods. Not much different from Baidu, a state-protected copy of Google, nurtured by China (while the Communist Party hobbled and censored Google's search operations), and best known for cooperating with Party censorship.

The technology world has become terribly warped since modern China showed up for the dance, and very few companies have retained their culture, their missions, or, more obviously, their earnings or (therefore) their CEOs.  But Google has, and for that, and for all of the deeper reasons behind that, its management deserves the respect of innovating companies and countries worldwide.

But

What Is Google?