The Internet War of the Roses: Microsoft vs.Google

I am not at the front lines of the technology battle/war that has ensued between Microsoft and Google. Unlike John "Mcplain" McCain I am not a foot soldier in anyone's army currently. (Though I could pretend to be one on TV, like Mcplain did at the Reagan Library this week.)

The recent takeover bid by Microsoft of the former internet darling Yahoo! was long thought to be a sound business decision. The joining of their forces was seen as a marriage of aging man that is incredibly rich (Microsoft) and a divorcee (Yahoo!) that still looks pretty good and has a few tricks left to turn. (A bad pun.)

As Andrew Ross Sorkin at the NYT reflects:

The message that jolted Mr. Yang also jolted the technology industry. Yahoo,
founded by two Stanford graduate students, Mr. Yang and David Filo, was once the
leader of the dot-com world. But it has been dethroned in recent years by
Google, itself founded by two Stanford graduate students.

This battle will barely begin before Bill Gates steps down as the chairman of Microsoft, leaving it in the capable, if only marginally visible hands of Steven A. Ballmer. As Google and Microsoft enter their virtual cage match of internet death in 2008-9, one suspects they will be fighting a War of the Virtual Roses.

Wikipedia quotes on the War of the Roses:

The antagonism between the two houses started with the overthrow of King Richard II by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, in 1399. As an issue of Edward III's third son John of Gaunt, Bolingbroke had a very poor claim to the throne. According to precedent, the crown should have passed to the male descendants of Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence, Edward III's second son, and in fact, Richard II had named Lionel's grandson, Roger Mortimer, 4th Earl of March as heir presumptive.

However, Bolingbroke was crowned as Henry IV. He was tolerated as king since Richard II's government had been highly unpopular. Nevertheless, within a few years of taking the throne, Henry found himself facing several rebellions in Wales, Cheshire and Northumberland, which used the Mortimer claim to the throne both as pretext and rallying point. All these revolts were suppressed.

The wars were also fought largely by the landed aristocracy and armies of feudal retainers. Support for each house largely depended upon dynastic factors, such as marriages within the nobility, feudal titles, and tenures. It is sometimes difficult to follow the shifts of power and allegiance because nobles acquired or lost titles through marriage, confiscation or attainture.

This virtual war started long ago between Google and Microsoft as each has gobbled up companies, made threats, lay claim to the title, "Internet King" and put to work "coding
foot soldiers" to destroy each other's empire.

From the Sydney Morning Herald, from 2005:

After learning Lucovsky was leaving to take a job at Google, Ballmer picked up his chair and hurled it across his office, according to the declaration.

Ballmer then pejoratively berated Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Lucovsky recalled."I'm going to f---ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again," the declaration quotes Ballmer. "I'm going to f---ing kill Google."

Before joining Google, Schmidt was a top executive at Sun Microsystems Inc. and Novell Inc., a pair of tech companies that Microsoft has previously battled.

At this point, Microsoft was hoping to legally stop Google's expansion after they had hired away ex-Gates guy Kai Fu-Lee to head up expansion into the megamarket of China. (Yahoo! also made news in 2007 in assisting the Chinese government in a crackdown on free speech.)

As a result, Microsoft is buying Yahoo! to thwart Google in the mother-of-all emerging markets, China. And to improve their share of an all ready non-competitive market as this quote reflects from the NYT's Andrew Ross Sorkin:

The combination of Yahoo and Microsoft would create a more powerful counterweight to Google. Yahoo’s audience, already the largest on the Internet,
would be bolstered by the tens of millions of users of Microsoft’s services,
creating a much larger online display advertising business. In Internet search,
the market share of the two companies would rise to 31 percent of the
American market, according to comScore. That would still be far below Google’s 58 percent share, but would help the companies attract more advertisers and higher prices for ads.

89 percent in two companies!!!

Hardly seems fair.

But War never is.

Money, The Blogging World & Amateurs: What is the inconvienent truth?

This weekend Andrew Keen was on Coast to Coast (the paranormal, wet works, military industry complex, UFO show) promoting his book on how the Web 2.0 was being ruined. The Cult of the Amateur, Mr. Keen's book , I suppose (since I haven't read the whole thing) lashes back at the evolution of the Internet and the cacophony that exists on Myspace, Youtube and Wikipedia.


Blogs are in this mess too. Making money off blogs and otherwise subsidizing your income (until you're considered a professional) to him is very bad. I don't disagree, but then again, the creme can rise to the top and should. He complains about this noise that is taking away from preexisting enterprises such as TV & print media, the music industry and Hollywood. (Presuming that what they hash out, say in the last 25 years, has been worthy of note...it hasn't.)


He complains about this phenomena stifling creativity or being used as a political tool as he introduced with the propaganda film made by Neocons about Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth'. Once again, I don't totally disagree that a democratized media realm is hurting THE TRUTH because spindoctors can put their medicinal thoughts on the view and presto!, the alteration is complete and the truth is now voided.


But how is this different from the mainstream media that pushed the 45-90 second sound bites? Or presented their views via a massive corporate conglomerate backing (GE) of (NBC) views on any story? It isn't really different, only the amount of money(billions versus thousands), the amount of experience (of the broadcasters and editors) and the amount of reputation (of conflicting value) is at odds.



In an example about Ken Lay, of Enron infamy, he uses the example of the end-all, be-all of knowledge: Wikipedia. I was new to Wiki as anything up until 2005. (If you've read me for a while, you know why.) Anyways, Mr. Keen uses the quick evolution of the post on how Mr. Kenneth Lay died as an example of what is wrong. And then Anna Nicole Smith weird circumstances...



What Mr. Keen forgets about is all the history records, print media and TV media have done EXACTLY the same things. Dewey Wins! for a momumental example of running the story before it is TRUE. William L. Shirer who wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich explained in his autobiography how in the 1920's in Paris, alongside James Thurber, they would write whole stories based on snippets received of a teletype for the Chicago Tribune. They were really creative with the truth.



Nothing in that realm (on reporting) has changed.



But what has changed is the control of who is doing this - instead of 'experts' we got 15-year olds with mad skills on Wii, Playstation 3 and their cellphones/iphones.



In its near infancy, the Internet was a great place for all information passage. My first contact with it was in 1992-93 at Purdue. I spent hours in 1994-95 downloading whatever I could from a manageable list of favorite places to go. No fucking presence by big corporate thunderheads out to filter and push content. No ads. No threat of viruses. No spamming that I remember. I even dated a girl I met via the Internet for several months. And she was real and the conversations made sense.



I don't disagree the internet now is infused by bad-intentioned people. Many that take authorship of ideas and opinions and splicing them together with their own. And plenty of uneducated ones posing as experts on God knows what.



As a result, the good old government and big business are purposing laws to restrict the access, invoke 'standards' and harnessing the average citizen with limits. The problem is most of our congressmen/ladies are not particular swift yet with the medium. Some are - the younger representatives that recently graduated from college - but anyone over 60, I would guess is lost by the construct of it all.



Moreover, they are utilizing Google and other internet companies to spy on us, the one point I don't disagree at all with Mr. Keen's thoughts. His Big Brother viewpoint has merit because we give up freedom too easily today and become the slaves of whatever ominous wind is blowing in the minds of our leaders. That is extremely dangerous to US ALL.



He references new age authorship/plagiarizing as being Alice in Wonderland down-the-rabbit-hole logic which will have deleterious effects on our society. I don't disagree here either, but this is not a new problem. People stealing ideas is as old as time. What is apparent is that we (society) will succumb to a hodge-podge of disjointed thoughts and become ever more ignorant in the process.



What is problematic for me is to support now a once-insider to this phenomena - Mr. Andrew Keen. It took him this long to figure out what is wrong about the internet, after making plenty of cash off the problem he assisted greatly in creating. It's not all his fault. But he came pretty late to the game. (Writing a book now - to do what? - generate more cash or prestige?)

I stop visiting chat rooms in 1999. It had become a pool of drivel from the chins of parasites, predators and piranhas(or piranas). Since then, I stopped talking on professional sports message boards in late 2004. I got tired of the inanity of those folks too. In neither case, did I lose some privilege of speaking, but I got tired of trying for reason and getting nowhere fast.

Whatever this Internet Monster becomes as an ultra-smart version (3.0) of Frankenstein's vision, we will as a people soon either bend to its flawed, unerring will or we will define the monster's purpose, vision, heart and soul to be more human than humanity has been. I'd like to believe in that latter hope, but the download is incomplete and the disk is nearly full of it....

Later folks!