March 2007
Monthly Archive
Thu 29 Mar 2007
Posted by Pierre-Etienne under
Google ,
Microsoft1 Comment
Recently, Thomas Rubin, Microsoft’s associate general counsel, addressed the Association of American Publishers’annual meeting in New York and argued in his speech that Microsoft’s Live Search Books honors copyright protection and fair use whereas Google’s Book Search abuses it. He said that “Google has chosen the wrong path for the longer term, because it systematically violates copyright and deprives authors and publishers of an important avenue for monetizing their works. […] Google has also undertaken this path without any attempt to reach an agreement with affected publishers and authors before engaging in copying“. Indeed, Google’s book’s policy is one of the main chink in Google’s armor and Microsoft envisages to capitalize on it.
Two different approaches
Google’s concept is to index the World’s libraries and to offer entire books or sometimes just snippets to the public. As books are copyrighted (like websites), Google allows authors to opt-out of the search engine. In contrast to Google, Microsoft has adopted an opt-in approach; in other words, Microsoft only indexes books that are no longer copyrighted or books which have been approved for indexing by their authors via Microsoft’s Publisher Program. However, in this Battle, the arguments of Google are weak. Indeed their opt-out approach is not justifiable and can not be compared to websites indexing insofar as the authors have never come down in favor of an online use of their books. Moreover, opt-out approaches on the Internet are not very popular: take for example the Spam issue.
Microsoft’s opportunity
As Forbes explains it, Microsoft’s attack against Google is strategic. For 10 years, Microsoft has been criticized because of his supremacy and its monopolistic will which has been illustrated by anti-trust trials; whereas Google enjoys a very good image. Thus, by criticizing and bashing Google, Microsoft is trying to differentiate itself from its opponent and position itself on a higher moral ground.
So, its time for Google to adjust its strategy and to remenber its “Don’t be Evil” mantra or else Microsoft is going to use it against it, which is dangerous for Google whose capitalization is in a great extent based on its popularity.
Sun 25 Mar 2007
Posted by Pierre-Etienne under
Google ,
Microsoft ,
Yahoo!1 Comment
American Giants Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have made China one of their priorities for growth and are considerably expanding their research and development centers in China. Thus Google has recently announced (source: IHT) its plan to hire thousands of people for its Beijing development center; Yahoo! is launching Flickr.com, its photo-sharing site, in China and Microsoft is developing its partners network. This expansion has also raised several polemics one of whom was the rumor of complicity of Yahoo! in the arrest of a journalist in China.
The Chinese Market
Almost unknown outside China, Baidu.com is very similar to Google, has almost the same simple home page and the same Business Model. Launched in 2001, Baidu went public in 2005 and was the biggest opening on Nasdaq since the dot-com peak in 2000. According to the Search Engine Market Survey 2006 from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), “Baidu’s market share is increasing constantly to 62.1%. This means more than 60% internet users are going to choose Baidu as the first option when searching online. Google’s market share in this segment is 25.3%, decreased 8 percent points when compared with the performance at same period last year.“. Thus Yahoo! and Google are challengers on this Market which is presented below (source: NYT):
Yahoo! and Google’s Chinese Challenges
The Chinese Internet Market is very different from the Western one. Indeed in China there is a really developed entertainment culture, which appears on the Internet and which Internet companies follow. However Google and Yahoo! do not take enough this culture difference into account and therefore are loosing ground (cf. evolution of the pay-per-click market on the graphs above). However, beyond this necessary cultural adaptation, the American Giants have some advantages: a big capitalization and an important technical task force.
So, the Battle begins and is off to a good start!
Thu 22 Mar 2007
Net Neutrality is at the core of the Internet Battle and will be one of the main aspects of the trade war which we will follow through this blog. To sum up, Net Neutrality refers to the current principle that Internet should be neutral which means Internet users should have the choice in what content they view and what applications they use on the internet.
As the SavetheInternet.com Coalition explains it in the video on the left, American’s main cable and telephone companies such as AT&T, Verizon or Comcast want to charge Internet companies for quality-of-service (QoS); in other words they want to tax content providers to guarantee faster delivery of their data. For example, last year, Verizon’s CEO argued that Google should have to pay for bandwidth. However, even if they pretend to do it in a non-discriminatory way, their main strategy is to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, etc by blocking or slowing down their competitors. Paul Kaputska notes in his blog that the message of telecommunication companies is “Google is bad, and wants to control the Internet to keep its cash pile growing. Telcos, meanwhile, just want to innovate, so please don’t write laws keeping them from doing so.”. However, beyond this trade war is the issue of the Public Interest.
Google and Microsoft common position
Even if Google was recently at the center of a buzz which alleges that Google was backing off its full commitment to Net Neutrality legislation, rumor that has been refuted 4 days ago, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, InterActive Corp., Microsoft and Yahoo! are the principle supporters of Net Neutrality among the leading high-tech companies and they try to influence the FCC to adopt a Net Neutrality Law. Via this blog, we will follow this issue and its economical and technical consequences.
Thu 22 Mar 2007
Posted by Renaud et Pierre-Etienne under
FirmsNo Comments
Hi folks,
It’s been a while that we wanted to create a blog in order to follow the evolution of this so interesting industry. Now, we’re ready to start. For us, this blog will be the opportunity to follow and to comment the high thrilling Battle between the Internet Giants such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, etc. from Business or End-users perspectives.
When you look back more than ten years ago at the beginning of the Internet, who could have imagined the way it has turned ? Today, could you imagine a day without using the Internet (information, mails, videos, musics…) ? It’s crazy.
Anyway, we are very excited for this blog. We hope you will appreciate that and are waiting for your comments and feed-backs!
See you :) !
Renaud & Pierre-Etienne
NB: Many thanks for Toinou to help us out for this beautiful template!!