Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Nick Carr is apparently feeling very confident that he got his forthcoming “The Big Switch” right.

In the last four days alone, as he pitches preorders of his soon to be follow-up best seller to “IT Doesn’t Matter,” Carr shares with the world at his blog that he knows “precisely what the future of personal computing looks like,” i.e. the Apple-Google product roadmap, and he offers up a Wal-Mart IT fueled ”I told you so,” plus a New York Times pay wall spurred “so there” to counter would be critics and non-believers.

1) The Carr ‘Jobs-Schmidt’ crystal ball: So how long before the first Google-Apple Cloud computer appears? I would say it’s months, not years. Robert X. Cringley rebutted Carr’s “simple” fortune telling and I refute Google’s world wide advertiisng domination “fantasy.” SEE: Radio Ads Stall: Google Pins Offline Advertising Hopes On TV

2) Carr riffs off of reporting done by the Financial Times regarding an esoteric academic study of how newspapers’ online editions may cannibalize flagship print publications to counter “whoops and  hollers from the members of the Web’s hallelujah chorus” which cheered the demise of the New York Times’ pay wall last month; For his part, Carr declares “setting prices should be a rational act, not an ideological or sentimental one.” I postulated same upon the NYT’s announcement of no more Times Select last month. SEE: NY Times $10 million Free News Bet NOT a Sure Thing

3) “For Wal-Mart, too, IT is a commodity” Carr now declares in defense of his old book:

After I wrote “IT Doesn’t Matter” back in 2003, critics would routinely present Wal-Mart as the killer counter example to my argument that information technology rarely provides a competitive advantage anymore…

Now, with commodity software greatly advanced, Wal-Marts’ custom systems have turned from advantage to disadvantage, and the IT analysts have changed their tune.

Carr deems Wal-Mart to be scrambling to buy packaged software so it is not left in the legacy IT dust:

The company has recently purchased off-the-shelf pricing and business-intelligence software form Oracle and HP, and on Thursday it announced it would install an SAP system for financial management and reporting.

BUT, do (big) buy versus build decisions really signify Wal-Mart has admitted defeat in its strategic deployment of information systems? NO!

SAP is claiming its products help companies “achieve their goals for leadership and growth, resulting in competitive advantage.”

Moreover, by being IT source neutral, Wal-Mart’s technology investment decisions become even more strategic for an even greater ability to create competitive advantage.

Google employs a similar strategic buy-versus-build rationale in its engineering acquisition strategy:

dMarc Broadcasting, YouTube, Writely, JotSpot, GrandCentral, Zenter, Postiini, Zingku, Jaiku…

Google is IT source neutral, big time, buying lots of companies and/or software and/or engineers, as well as recruiting its own in-house rocket-scientists, lots of them.

If Google is cheered for its strategic scoffing at the “not invented here syndrome,” Wal-Mart ought to be as well. 

Google even touts how supposedly commodity IT becomes a competitive advantage, when it becomes Googley:

From the beginning, Google’s developers recognized that providing the fastest, most accurate results required a new kind of server setup. Whereas most search engines ran off a handful of large servers tha often slowed under peak loads, Goolge employed linked PCs to quickly finds each query’s answer. The inovation paid off in faster response times, greater scalability and lower costs. It’s an idea that others have since copied, while Google has continued to refine its back-end technology to make it even more efficient.

Bottom line: information technology does matter, and it matters what companies do with it, just ask Google.

BTW: When Google was a Stanford research project, it was nicknamed BackRub because the technology checks backlinks to determine a site’s importance.

ALSO: Powerset vs. Google? NO! Amazon EC2 vs. the Googleplex and Facebook, the Web’s State Fair vs. LinkedIn, the Chamber of Commerce

PLUS: Startups: Who Needs Business Plans? Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mayfield, Sequoia… and CED Tech 2007: 30 Cool Startups, But NO Facebook Apps

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN 

Is Paul Graham sending the right message to our young men? How about the NBA?

Just as every LeBron James wannabe hoopster should NOT be hyped into believing who needs college, every Sergey Brin wannabe hacker should not be spun a Google billionaire fairytale.

LeBron is a moneymaking star machine, Kwame Brown is not. Brin is a high-flying cash machine, the Zenter (now Googler) developers are not.

Quinnipiac University student newspaper on why “NBA’s age restriction adds maturity and talent to rosters”:

The age restriction forces inexperienced players to take a year to develop rather than sit on NBA benches. Such development would almost certainly have helped Brown more than sitting on the bench in Washington. Clearly, James needed no additional development. Yet, wouldn’t his already phenomenal resume look even better if he had played in a Final Four in the 2003-04 season?

And wouldn’t basketball fans have benefited from witnessing James possibly go for a national title that year, rather than play for a developing Cavs team?

YCombinator’s Graham on why “leaving” college, rather than graduating with a degree, is potentially a very  good thing:

If you’re starting your own company, why do you need a degree?

Right, and if you are going to be the next Michael Jordan, why do you need to even pretend to care about college?

BUT, how many Michael Jordans might there ever be AND how many Brin billionaires might the world sustain?

Just as the Internet’s “court jester,” Esther Dyson  led would be startups astray in June when she cajoled to hackers “throw out your development, go use Facebook,” YCombinator is NOT serving the nations future hackers well by validating that it “matters less whether students get degrees.”

Who needs college? Who needs business plans? are NOT the right questions for startup hackers: WHO NEEDS GOOGLE is what truly savvy entrepreneurial coders will say to themselves, just as paper billionaire Mark Zuckerberg apparently says to himself every day!

While Graham hails Google for “standardizing” startup acquisitions so “they’re little more work than hiring someone,” I lament that brilliant deveoplers of proprietary software IP are selling themseleves short by selling out on the cheap to Google.

The latest prime example: Sami Shalabi, of not quite Zingku fame.

Read my Insider Chatter exclusives: Zingku Backstory: Founder Sami Shalabi Newest Google Engineer? and Zingku Flips to Google: NO Dodgeball Hacker Lessons Learned!

Also, before signing on the low-ball Googley dotted line, read the Googleplex-centric startup advice of Google’s star biz dev guy, Chris Sacca, who proudly calls himself a “corporate sellout interloper.”

In Sacca’s actual words, “STAY CHEAP”:

I see too many entrepreneurs these days feeling the need to build an entire company to support what is essentially a feature of a larger search engine. It depresses me to see creative people wasting productive cycles on the mundane aspects of building full companies. Y Combinator gets this.

But Mr. Sacca, HOW can emulation of a rule the world for bilions strategy as followed by your chief, Sergey Brin, ever be deemed “mundane”? Was Brin “wasting” his creativity by building out his global vision to pocket billions for himself?

Why DO Sacca and Graham evangelize startup sellouts the faster the better? So they can get THEIR big money returns the faster the better.

Graham disses the “stigma of inadequacy” in quick startup flips. If he was really looking out for hackers’ long-term best interests, though, he would push his stable of ramen noodle funded coders into trying to BE the next Google, rather than hoping to be the next hackers to sell themselves to Google, on the cheap.

MORE: Got a Tech Startup? Google is NO Angel and Zenter: Google Product Development on Spec

ALSO: The Real Madison Ave: Before (and after) Google and Social Fireworks Alert: LinkedIn vs. ‘Loud Mouth McClure’?

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Google Engineering powers on.

Rich Skrenta hails “Kosmix releases Google GFS workalike ‘KFS’ as open source.”

At the same time, Google is taking over the technology of Zingku. 

More and more it seems that Mark Zuckerberg really is unique in having started as a hacker and wanting to build a company, rather than merely flip software to one of the big guys. Where IS the engineering glory in being absorbed by the Googleplex, hook, line and hacker, for pennies on the future dollar?

After all, Google is NO angel!

Contrary to popular perception, Google’s ”acquisiition” of Zenter was not the epitomy of the American entrepreneurial dream come true, it was the culmination of the efforts of two detmermined hackers to woo Mountain View via Google Apps product development on spec.

How valuable was the Y Combinator backed Zenter to Google? Chris Sacca, Google biz dev guy:

Y combinator comes down to two kids in a room with two computers and ramen noodles for a summer.

Google may be making billions by enticing advertisers to blindly bid up their own rate cards, but it is highly unlikely that Google itself would bid up the value of a few thousand man hours of ”ramen noodle” sponsored coding.

The Zenter duo invested a few months of their lives in non-stop hacking with the goal of winning over Google, and they did. Grand prize? Engineering jobs at Google!

Mountain View directly wooed the founding hackers of Dodgeball to the Google engineering team in 2005, with promises of even greater mobile social networking glory. Today, Dodgeball remains an unwanted stepchild of Google while the hackers behind it have long declared their emancipation from the world of Google “rocket scientists.”

What about Zingku? Still in “private beta,” Google is acquiring “certain assets and technology” of the mobile social networking service, undoubtedly on the cheap, and most likely with the founding engineer(s), hook, line and hacker!

EXCLUSIVE: READ MORE in Zingku Backstory: Founder Sami Shalabi Newest Google Engineer?

ALSO: Adobe Buzzword Buzz Kill: NO Virtual Ubiquity

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

YAY FOR YAHOO HACKERS! Hack@Yahoo! program, “where developers build cool tools or functionality on top of Yahoo! products.”

“Every company that has forgotten to remain innovative has ultimately lost in the next technology change.” Who said? GOOGLE CEO Eric Schmidt. What has he done so that his Googley rocket scientists remember to be innovative: Have them follow the golden Google 70-20-10 rule!

“We spend 70 percent of our time on core search and ads. We spend 20 percent on adjacent businesses, ones related to the core business in some interesting way. And then 10 percent of our time should be on things that are truly new.”

The Schimdt innovation formula dates from when the core of Google was merely “Search and Ads.” Google has subsequently declared itself to be “Search, Ads AND Apps,” even though GOOG remains stubbornly 99% AdWords pure!

Yahoo’s attempt at publicly sharing its innovation strategy has not been as “sticky”: Peanut Butter Manifesto, anyone?

Nevertheless, Yahoo has been hacking along and has some innovative hacks to show for it.

Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo Development, proudly shares how “hacks come to life” at Yahoo:

Internal Hack Days offer Yahoos a chance to take a break from their day-to-day to spend 24 hours hacking away at any creative idea that strikes their fancy. Thousands of Yahoos have joined in, creating thousands of hacks — some aimed at enhancing an existing product, some at introducing new concepts, and some just give us a good laugh.

While the main goal is to provide an outlet for people to express themselves, some hacks have made the journey from basic demo to product roadmap, and all the way to full-scale rollout.

Yahoo’s two new Yahoo hacker derived products:

SHOP BY COLOR: Lets shoppers find products in the color they want by using a color palette of 56 different hues. The palette scans more than 10 million products in the Yahoo! Shopping catalogue, including apparel, beauty, home and garden, and electronics categories.

MAPMIXER: Allows other maps to be layered over a Yahoo! Map to show additional detail of a location Now you can mix together the detail of a point-of-interest map — such as airports, college campuses, sports arenas, historic maps — with the web functionality offered by Yahoo!

Want in on Yahoo hacking fun? If you happen to be in India next month, you’re invited to Yahoo Bangalore office’s inaugural Open Hack Day on October 5-6, so says Horowitz.

ALSO: Brin & Page Takeoff for NASA: Google Rocket Scientists Land at Moffett and NOT So Fair: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Claim YOUR Content for Free

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Does Facebook want to be the next Google? Mark Zuckerberg already claims to run the number one people search engine.

Dave Morin, Facebook senior platform developer, is now taking a page from the infamous Matt Cutts, Google’s Webspam fighter. Just as the world’s Webmasters brace for Cutts’ pronouncements at his blog of dos and don’ts impacting Google’s almighty PageRank, the world’s Facebook App developers shuddder when Morin posts Facebook Developer dos and don’ts for the almighty Facebook Platform.

Morin’s good cop, bad cop routine for “good apps,” bad apps: We’re focused on making “a better experience for both developers and users.”

In other words, Facebook Applications will be prohibited going forward from: 1) displaying profile content that the user isn’t aware of, and 2) email functionality within notifications.

Facebook is also “shifting” how Facebook Applications interact with the directory, invitation tool and news feeds.

Morin says Facebook wants to promote “good apps,” so that “the applications that achieve the most growth and usage are the ones that are the highest quality and add the most utility to users’ lives,” regardless of the individual (mis)fortunes of Facebook Developers.

Cutts always says Google “does what we think is best to maintain the relevance of our search results, and that includes taking action” against Websites, regardless of the individual (mis)fortunes of Webmasters.

At the end of the Google day, Google rules, for the good of Google shareholders AND Facebook rules for the good of Mark Zuckerberg and company.

Want in on “free” Google and Facebook love, play by their rules.

ALSO READ: Lending Club $108 billion Market Opp ex Facebook: Goodbye Banks! EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

AND: NewsFriends? Facebook Anti Social Utility: Real Friends DON’T Share and Hey Facebook! Free Robert Scoble: Unlock Your 5000 Friend Quota

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Facebook believes honesty is the best policy–for developers–declaring “misleading notifications” verboten via a new “200 Permissions Error.”

Mark Zuckerberg continues to play his own Facebook word games though, big time.

Facebook is NOT a social network, it is a vaunted social utility, the world’s social graph, is the Facebook company line; And, Zuckerberg is sticking to it, except at the U.S. Patent Office!

The famously command and control Facebook PR team forbids Facebook applications from using the phrases “college site” or “social networking site” in relation to anything Facebook. In fact, Facebook threatens application partners with “termination of access to the Facebook Platform” if they dare to call Facebook a “social networking site.”

Facebook applications are also prohibited from mentioning the name of any social network (besides itself!) in public communications. Zuckerberg, himself, strives to “correct” supposedly erroneous media comparisons of Facebook with the number one (by far) social network, MySpace.

Facebook is NOT the same social animal as the (lowly) MySpace network, Facebook wants the world to believe. Facebook is in such a special world of its own, according to Facebook, that uttering the term “social network” in the same breath as the name Facebook is an absurdity.

If so, then Mr. Z. himself is being quite absurd, with the U.S. Patent Office.

In his United States Patent Application for “Systems and methods for social mapping,” Zuckerberg, Mark; et al, EXTOLS THE SOCIAL NETWORK!

Does Zuckerberg describe the virtues of a social utility in his patent application? NO. Does Zuckerberg lay claim to a social graph in his patent application? NO.

What DOES the anti-social networking Mark Zuckerberg proclaim in his patent application? An “invention” for the said reviled social networking.

Zuckerberg describes not how to make a “social graph” but how to build a “social network engine”:

A method for social mapping comprising receiving data about a plurality of social network members, allowing a first member of the plurality of social network members to identify a second member of the plurality of social network members to establish a relationship.

In other words, how to design, develop and implemement a big, bad SOCIAL NETWORK, a la (not?) arch rival MySpace!

Despite Zuckerberg’s “old college try” at enveloping Facebook within high falutin notions of “social utility” and declaring itself a “social graph,” Facebook is, at its core, a social network, indeed a direct competitor to “lowly” MySpace, regardless of Facebook’s public protestations.

Zuckerberg is NOT protesting Facebook’s social network birthright with the U.S. Patent Office though!

ALSO: TripAdvisor Wants Facebook App? Zuckerberg to Leave Millions on the Table and Facebook iPhone Hype Busting: Multiply.com Rules, 13 Mobile Media Ways

PLUS: Google News is a Joke: L.A. Times is NOT Laughing

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN