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TechCrunch, Don’t Be Smug: Google did the “Right Thing®”

So TechCrunch thinks Google bailed on China because the going was just too tough. They weren’t the market share leader and had so much to lose that they backed out of the most promising market in the history of the Internet in order to stop the “bleeding.” I tend to disagree with that assessment.

Why, if Google were so afraid of wasteful business practices that they would pull out of their biggest growth market for content products, would they be involved in similarly valueless gambits? Take things like GoogleVoice, Google Wave, the cloud, Android, and projects like that. These aren’t profitable ventures for Google, but may indeed become so at some point, especially Android and Voice. The point is, Google spends all kinds of money on things that make folks scratch their head because they believe there’s money to be made.

China is no different, except that something clear scared the balls off of Google in the process. Be it the communist secret police or a blackmail offer that would’ve been even more embarrassing to Google than the Chinese government-backed breach of Gmail they just revealed, SOMETHING scared Google away from the biggest treasure trove of the next decade. And that something was big. Yet to believe TechCrunch’s assessment, you’d have to assume the move was purely profit-driven and not really borne of any moralistic decision. Again, I tend to disagree. Profit decision or not, at the end of the day, Google DID THE RIGHT THING. Why is it so hard for all these young pay-per-post bloggers to understand we’re talking about brutal social communism?

So TechCrunch’s echoing of the silly notion that China is a bad market for Google because it’s just too hard for them—ahh, that’s justy a goofy idea. Have you ever known Google to back down from a market fight? Me neither. If you answer no, then TechCrunch advises you to “sit the hell down and shut the hell up”. They should rename their web site BlowHard.

Somebody call Mike Arrington and hook his writers up with Critical Thinking 101 at the local community college.

Three Cheers for Google as it Eats its Own Words Regarding China

It’s too bad it took the Chinese Government botnetting Google in order to get them to realize the importance of free expression to a country like China, struggling to break bloodlessly free from the Chinese communist party. Google has decided to no longer censor the search results on Google’s Chinese portal. But it’s also embarrassing to me, as an American, to see how much care has been taken by Google not to piss off China in their wording of the official response.

…advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

What Google won’t say here, and I don’t know why, is this. Who besides the Chinese government has an unhealthy interest in the e-mail communications of Chinese human rights activists? Those “third parties” Google mentioned were probably the Guoanbu and the MSS, two Chinese agencies that, if you’re a human rights activist (or a salvation-believing Christian), you do NOT want to mess with.

But Google is on the right track. Responding to China, saying they’re willing to shut down operations in China if the archaic Chinese governing class aren’t willing to cave on the issue of censorship, is a good move. But why wait until now? I was heartbroken when Google capitulated to China’s censorship demands in the name of the Almighty Buck. I even chided Google as un-American.

So putting teeth behind this fiasco–great move. I would advise the Obama Administration to take a cue from Google’s chief counsel, who wrote their official response, and grow some teeth of their own as Google has done. Hillary Clinton’s response from the Department of State was neither as informed nor as smart. In fact, I’d call it useless.

James Fallows adds that, at the end of the day, this decision doesn’t really hurt anybody except Google. It doesn’t deal a real blow to China, in his opinion, because Chinese Internet consumers are, generally speaking, not going to work too hard to get around the government’s censorship. As one Tweeter put it, it’s not Google withdrawing from China. It’s China withdrawing from the world. To me, that means Google is finally, thankfully, just doing the right thing.

Srsly? Google has removed the download links for Gizmo?

If anybody wants to let me know where the Gizmo download links disappeared to, I’d sure appreciate it. After fighting with Gizmo for many months about a year ago, trying to keep it from becoming corrupt on my Mac (which required me to reinstall it repeatedly), I eventually gave up on it, switched to Skype, and then eventually stopped using IM altogether.

Now I can’t blame that on Gizmo. Much of it has to do with the SwitchVox system and iPhone I adopted for business use–those two have been transformational to the way I communicate daily. But now that Google has lapped up the Project, I’m interested in seeing if the Mac version has lost its self-destructive tendencies. But presto the download links are gone. Boo.

Google’s Entirely Frank Defense of Google Voice

It’s no secret Ma Bell isn’t happy with “upstarts” like Google Voice elbowing into their turf. The VoIP FUD machine, fueled by the telecom industry’s status quo, has been running on full blast for the last ten years, even to the extent that, until recently anyway, I was willing to concede that Ma Bell had won.

Now that AT&T has begun to ring the FCC about it’s dissatisfaction with certain players whose VoIP apps have gained momentum–chief among them Google Voice–the overwhelming debate between players in the Internet and telecom fields is now an out-front, obvious affair. This is due, I suppose, to Google’s use of very frank, conversational techniques–like blogging–in defending its policy positions and in describing its products or advances.

Ultimately, Google is arguing that AT&T would like the FCC to regulate that all VoIP apps that originate or terminate calls on the PSTN–Skype and Google Voice, both mentioned in Google’s rebuttle–be treated like phone lines, and idea that Google and I both agree is silly.

I vote for getting rid of the term “phone line” altogether. Where the app can’t be separated from the transport (as in a phone line), leave the existing regulations (and taxes) in place. But as that paradigm dies, so should the regulations intended to take advantage of its popularity.

Microsoft will rely on entrenchment as its primary market motivator

It’s clear to me now that Microsoft, one of the “great American companies” I often refer to when talking to my kids about things I admire in business, has switched from advancement to entrenchment as its retention strategy for existing customers. That is, rather than move their platforms forward and pull global businesses along with them, a more defensive strategy is emerging–one where Microsoft tries not to hemorrhage too much business to Google and even Apple by reminding companies how cheap it is NOT to migrate away from the Microsoft eco-system.

A fantastic example of this dynamic came to light today when it was announced that the next version of Microsoft Office for Mac will replace Redmond’s clunky Entourage e-mail app with an actual Mac OS X version of Outlook, the predominant e-mail application used in medium and large enterprises. My company alone supports somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve-hundred Outlook nodes at about fifteen different firms. So a Mac version of Outlook, as the t-shirt saying goes, is “kind of a big deal.”

But what’s an even bigger deal is that Outlook once ran natively on the Mac–on Mac OS 9 anyway–and shared a great deal in common with its Windows cousin. And, suffice it to say, it was a better product than its redheaded stepchild, Entourage. It makes me wonder why they ever canned Outlook on the Mac to begin with.

Now I’m beginning to understand that Microsoft is on an all-hands mission to get as many enterprises, large and small, as entrenched as possible before Google and other market players really step to the plate with something that competes with Microsoft, and in particular Outlook and Office. (Anybody who suggests that Google Apps currently beats Microsoft Office is smoking some pretty harsh crack, sorry guys.)

Entrenchment is the key to damage control: keep the customer believing that it will cost them more in dollars and difficulty to move away from Microsoft, no matter how compelling the alternative, and they’ll stick with Microsoft. This was how they (soundly) destroyed Lotus Notes, and Redmond’s incredible staying power may allow it to stave off Google Apps for quite a few years to come.

eWeek picks up on Apple’s DIY plans for Voice features

In an article posted today at eWeek, AT&T is excused from its traditional role as scapegoat in the Google Voice rejection fiasco. And my previously posted sentiments about Apple building something that competes with Google Voice have finally been echoed on a mainstream outlet.

Well doy, Apple realizes that consumer-empowering voice technology is a competitive advantage. We VoIP folks have been preaching that gospel for the last ten years. Comrade Ken Camp wrote with visionary accuracy about the merits of VoIP in his book IP Telephony Demystified, one of the really early books on the subject. I agreed with him when I wrote Switching to VoIP that VoIP is a leveler of the playing field, a true equalizer and a legitimately revolutionary technology item.

I’ve also viewed carriers like AT&T, at least for the last four or five years, as access providers, not “phone line providers” offering dialtone. Apple, it seems, has arrived at the same conclusion.

Three points on the Apple/Google/FCC Fiasco

First, it’s not the FCC’s domain but the Federal Trade Commission’s domain whether or not a business practice, like Apple’s (admittedly inconsistent) enforcement of it’s own developer agreements, is an unfair trade practice. And it may well be unfair; that doesn’t make it within the jurisdiction of the FCC, whose stock and trade isn’t social progress or anti-collusion. Clearly, those are business matters whose definition of justice has little or nothing to do with voice as an application. We have to be careful not to push the social progress agenda too hard–especially to the extend that we’re routinely punishing those who are earning a great profit, vis-a-vis Apple and the iPhone.

Second, let’s ask the real question: Since we know the decision to allow Google Voice is ultimately up to Apple, and not AT&T, what could Apple’s motivation for this rejection possibly be? Are we ignoring the simple answer? Enhancements to the iChat ecosystems, perhaps? The most obvious answer may not satisfy the conspiracy theorists. But something as easy as Apple is getting ready to release their own Voice-killer makes the most since to me, to heck with AT&T’s bandwidth.

Finally, I’ve almost concluded that AT&T’s days as the exclusive distributor of iPhones in North America are numbered. Apple would have to score a pretty low IQ to permanently marry their network support to a single carrier, with the rise of new wide-area wireless networking standards and mass WiFi addiction marching on with no favoritism towards Bell. This would seem to indicate, at least out here in the “sensible” midwest, that Apple is not beholden to AT&T, a company short on both sexy intellectual property and an applications-oriented revenue model, for a short-term political favor that screws its relationship with Google, a company who is enriched of both.

The answer to this mystery, I believe, is in Cupertino.

Signal to Noise

Teddy Wallingford, Rock and Roll CEO

Srsly? Google has removed the download links for Gizmo?

Google’s Entirely Frank Defense of Google Voice

Microsoft will rely on entrenchment as its primary market motivator

eWeek picks up on Apple’s DIY plans for Voice features

Three points on the Apple/Google/FCC Fiasco

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