With Respect TO the Tradmark issue in Adwords...
I have been blocked for a variety of trademarks through adwords before, even fairly generic names of small companies in small-town USA before. It seems kind of funny to me that you can misue Microsoft as much as you want.... |
"Loosely joined: Gmail allows you to forward all of your emails to another address, or to download them via POP (a standardized email protocol). This is the opposite of lock-in."
They have good reasons for that
If you read your mails with Outlook or Thunderbird, you don't see the ads.... |
but all the properties are "opt in" –
1) You can still run Y! Ads in blogger platform.
2) SERP also produces competition services e.g Map-Quest
3) Gmail content can easily be POP3'ed to another email client
4) API's are aglore for the development community.
As for the Trademark issue thru AdWords, "Google sucks" – why would they *not* want to protect their property ? I belive the same would true in MSN AdCenter too. Each one of the players will take steps to protect their properties. Does that imply a double standard ?
Wahts happening here, is a classic strategy of "loosely couple" and "tightly protected" properties. Why all the fuss ?? Because, it is messing up the traditional space on the web, companies, markets and services.
Enterprise Space is now getting "circled" by the Google services, the flaviods available using the API's and products is making traditionalist rethink what Google is doing.. after all 99% of products is about vanilla, mass-market office apps and services to the web!!
Google has built the grid which is scalable, realiable and as more user traction occurs, the services will become cheaper.
IMHO, we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg. Remember the Container based mobile DC that was rumored some time ago. Who knows, what will happen when they have mobile DC to populate the grid ? |
Even if they were all tightly joined, I don't think that it would be a problem in the same way Microsoft was. That's because:
* Competition is freely available. You can easily use other web services.
* Microsoft strong-armed computer companies in an anti-competitive manner (money, extortion, etc)
* Other large companies in the same space also tightly tie services together. For instance Yahoo's Launchcast Radio and its music service where you can purchase music. |
I was just about to chime in that I think you can add whatever ads you want to your Blogspot pages. I was under the impression that you can add quite a bit of original stuff to Google Page Creator pages as well.
Philipp, this is a very interesting post. Maybe you want to run through some other companies (Y!, MSN, AOL) to see how they compare? |
Oh, and it looks like the new Blogger beta provides RSS 2.0 export as well. I'm looking at a friend's blogspot page and see
link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="(friend's blog title) (RSS 2.0)" hruf="http://friendsblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml"
at the top of the page.. |
Has there ever been large company that did have people trying to take a bite out of them ? Where there is money to be made the lawyers will be there, Loose or Tight.
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Matt, one thing that google needs to do is standize the RSS foo.
blogger Beta : RSS2.0
Writely ?
GBase : Atom based
etc etc.. each service needs to follow a rigour within the folio. To be tightly coupled at a protocol level , this IMHO will become an imperative.
Right now its loosely glued together within various specs.. what's the vision on the protocol ?
and why is checkout not supporting RSS /Atom (?) per transaction ??
Thats the way of the future.... regardless of model.. :)-
disclaimer: I have not analyised all gogs services to see the specs on each of the services.. jus a quick rant between blogging BCE foo :)- |
I would consider google's chat/calendar integration more as a feature than a bad thing. You aren't obligated to use them (I don't, since I use desktop applications for that) and at the same time, they are there for your use. That integration and ease of use is what set Google ahead of the pack, and what is keeping them ahead.
That, and the crazy amount of money they make from adsense ;) |
After reading this, I was later ruminating on how the one thing I don't like about my switch to WordPress is that it was SO EASY to upload pictures in Blogger – just use Picasa and there's a handy button all set up!
This led me to think about several more areas of coupling: Picasa to Blogger, Hello (does anyone still use Hello? honest question), Google Desktop with Google Search and Search History would also offer options.
Honestly, in many ways tightly coupled can be better, as long as it's not done against, but in the consumer's interest. Of course it's better for the company as well. The point that these services are "opt-in" is very good. |
> Philipp, this is a very interesting post. Maybe you
> want to run through some other companies (Y!, MSN,
> AOL) to see how they compare?
When it comes to "tightly joined" services and lock-ins, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL lose in comparison to Google. First of all, I don't remember them ever linking to competition – like Google does when you search for locations, or music – and they also actively push their own sites when this is clearly not what the user is looking for; e.g. when you type "google.com" into Yahoo and they offer you to search with Yahoo.
You just need to visit Yahoo.com to see how they push their own sites instead of delivering just what's relevant. Then again, I don't know as much about Yahoo or Microsoft.
AOL on the other hand is completely off the scale. I still remember that I was once (way back) unable to cancel their trial software!
Microsoft however is opening up much more. E.g. .NET is a framework allowing many different kind of programming languages. They made their Visual Studio free (too late). Their Channel 9 blogs and video blogs are impressively honest. In the past, they acted differently.
On a side-note, I don't think it serves a company well to act selfishly; not creating a lock-in situation means making it much easier to switch (e.g. with Gmail). User trust can be earned by allowing people to switch and by always delivering the most relevant results, be they within your network of sites or outside of it... at least if you want to become a hub. For example, it did not serve Blogger well to push Atom, because that made some people not join the service. That's not how you can become a hub.
Another example is the official Google blog; as it doesn't serve bad news, it won't become an authority. People need to go other places to get a more realistic view on the company and its products. If they wanted to gain authority, they'd need to release bad news even when they're not pushed to it – that is, even when this news didn't yet appear in every other news source yet. (And yet, in a direct comparison with the Yahoo blog, Google fared slightly better so far, at least when I compare China censorship coverage.)
If anyone knows of good examples of Yahoo actively opposing lock-ins, I'd be interested to hear them... |
Nice article, but I found a wee mistake with respect to Google Page Creator: you can add third-party gadgets onl if you enable 'Experimental Features' in the Settings panel. This suggests that (hopefully) it will eventually be more loosely joined. |
