In its rise to Web dominance, Google has displaced plenty of companies, upended several industries, and made a slew of enemies along the way. Some of the adversaries are industry giants in their own right, such as Microsoft and Apple. Others are little-known start-ups that get publicity for raising concerns about Google but often fade back to obscurity when the news cycle ends.

For some rivals, the enmity runs deep. They accuse Google of poaching employees and infringing on copyrights. And still there are others whose complaints about Google’s dominance seems more strategic, an effort to put a hurdle in the way of the Web giant’s inexorable march on new markets.

With the Federal Trade Commission opening a probe into Google’s competitive practices, those enemies will have a new opportunity to raise their concerns to trustbusters. The list of enemies is long. Here are a few:

Microsoft: There’s no company that competes more aggressively with Google over a broader swath of products and services than Microsoft. It starts with search and search advertising, where Google continues to trounce Microsoft, despite billions spent by the software giant to displace it. Google is making headway against Microsoft in the productivity applications business, offering online versions of e-mail, spreadsheet, and word processing programs that compete with Microsoft’s Office suite. Its Chrome browser has taken market share from Internet Explorer. Its Android mobile phone operating system emerged as the most viable alternative to the iPhone in the smartphone market, and not Windows Phone. Microsoft’s recent bid to acquire Internet video chat provider Skype is seen by many through the spectrum of competition with Google, which has its own Google Voice service. And Microsoft, which knows better than most the difficult of a prolonged scuffle with trustbusters, has been the most active Google competitor running to regulators to voice its concerns.

James Martin/CNET)

Apple: It’s one of the oldest memes in the world–the best of friends can sometimes turn into the worst of enemies. In its early days, Google and Apple worked closely, so much so that Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt sat on Apple’s board. Those bonds broke, though, as Google began to develop its Android mobile phone operating system. Schmidt stepped down from Apple’s board, and soon thereafter Jobs reportedly laid into Google at an internal company meeting, saying, “We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake, they want to kill the iPhone.” The companies now compete in the browser market, e-mail, voice chat and a host of other services. And with Apple’s new iCloud offering, the companies are certain to butt heads in data storage as well.

Facebook: Google’s battle with Facebook is really about the future of the Web. If you believe that Facebook, where more and more computer users are spending their Web time, is becoming something of an alternative Internet, then Google has every right to be worried. While computer users are hanging out on Facebook, they’re not searching the Web using Google. Indeed, Facebook has forged ties with Microsoft, giving the Redmond rival access to its users to add social-networking features to its Bing search engine. Google has tried to match some Facebook features, most recently offering +1, a service that lets users show love for Web sites much in the same was Facebook users can “Like” a site. But at last month’s D9 conference, Schmidt, now Google’s executive chairman, acknowledged that he “screwed up” in watching social networking soar without Google.

Groupon:Google has made its mint selling online ads. But one area that’s proven somewhat difficult for the company is the local advertising market. Groupon, which offers daily deals in regional markets in 175 North American markets as well as markets in 42 other countries, has clearly cracked that market. That’s why Google reportedly offered $6 billion to acquire Groupon, a deal Groupon ultimately spurned. Google’s response: start its own rival daily deals service. Earlier this month, it rolled out Google Offers, starting first in Portland, Ore.

Oracle: Database software leader Oracle isn’t the most obvious enemy for Google. The two companies, who have a common enemy in Microsoft, don’t compete in any meaningful way. But Oracle filed suit last year, accusing Google of infringing on Java patents that Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems in January 2010. Last week, Oracle added another filing to the case, noting that it’s seeking damages that run “in the billions of dollars.”

PayPal: Google Checkout is a certainly a competitor to PayPal as a way to pay for goods and services online. But Google has plenty of competitors. The fight became more interesting when PayPal accused Google of poaching a key employee. Last month, PayPal sued Google, accusing it of misappropriating trade secrets from its mobile-payment business when it hired Osama Bedier, who had been a senior executive at PayPal, working on its mobile-payments platform. The same suit also accused Google VP of Electronic Commerce Stephanie Tilenius, another former PayPal executive, of violating her contract by recruiting her former colleague, Bedier. In response to the suit, Google said it respects trade secrets and intends to defend itself against the claims.

Copyright holders: Not all copyright holders, to be sure. But Google, in its quest to organize all the world’s information, often acts first and asks questions later. News organizations, including Agence France Press, once challenged Google for posting headlines, photographs, and news summaries on its Google News aggregation site without permission. And in its most ambitious effort to digitize every book ever written, Google ran afoul of authors, photographers and publishers. Even a settlement struck with key groups was rejected last March by the federal judge overseeing the case.

Travel search sites: Google’s push to dominate the most widely searched queries led it to acquire ITA Software, a little-known but powerful provider of technology to the travel industry. Expedia, Kayak and Hotwire, among others, use ITA’s software to fuel their services. So they banded together to raise concerns to regulators that Google’s acquisition of ITA posed a serious competitive threat. The Justice Department approved the acquisition in April, but with the caveat that Google continue licensing ITA’s travel technology to rivals for five years on “reasonable and nondiscriminatory” terms, and that Google forward to regulators any complaints from travel competitors about where they land in Google’s search rankings.

Article source: CNET

 

Google has taken a big step in trying to redefine the laptop, making it purely Web-centric, untethered to the Windows past.

Chromebooks are, in a way, tablets with keyboards, as Hugo Barra, director Android Product Management at Google, said today at Google’s I/O developers conference, streamed here. That’s a key point of departure from the traditional small Windows laptops, aka, Netbooks.

“Attributes that make phones and tablets great…we’re bringing this to notebooks,” he said.

Those attributes include Cloud-based apps, extreme portability, built-in 3G connectivity, instant-on, and all-day battery life–all hallmarks of tablets like Apple’s iPad and Motorola’s Xoom.

Acer’s Chromebook starts at $349 and 2.95 pounds. It runs Google’s Chrome OS on top of an Intel dual-core N570 Atom processor.

The similarly-sized Netbook, on the other hand, has been, since its debut in 2007, essentially a conventional Windows laptop, just smaller. Google’s focus on instant-on, instant Web connection is a seemingly trivial feature but a key difference between traditional laptops and so-called post-PC devices, like the smartphone and tablet.

“Every Chromebook is instant turn on. Every time you boot up, you’re up and running within eight seconds,” Barra said.

In this respect, Google may succeed where Qualcomm’s “smartbook” failed. That laptop actually aspired to many of the same things but never became a viable commercial product.

But the Chromebook’s novelty can potentially be a weakness. Particularly for businesses and educators still tied to Windows. Google is trying to address that with Web-based management features. “Seamless updates directly from Google keep the operating system and software fresh, eliminating the need to manually patch systems,” Google states on its Chromebook page. “And since only minimal data is stored on the device, you don’t need to do tedious backups or migrate data when changing hardware,” according to Google.

Google is also employing security features such as secure tabbed browsing (called “sandboxing”), user data encryption, and verified boot.

Both Acer and Samsung will release Chromebooks June 15 running the Chrome OS on top of Intel’s latest dual-core Atom N570 processor. And the N570 is a step up from the single-core Atom that powered the prototype CR-48 Chromebook, distributed to journalists, among others, in December.

Chromebook features:

• Pricing starts at $349 (Acer)
• Web-centric Chrome OS, automatically updated, maintained by Google
• About 3 pounds or less
• Dual-core Atom 1.66GHz N570 processor
• 16GB solid-state drive (mSATA)
• HDMI port
• 11-inch and 12-inch class displays
• All-day battery life (Samsung and Acer specify about 8 hours)
• Instant-on
• Instant Web connectivity
• 3G connectivity, pay as you go
• Cloud-based apps, but key applications local like Gmail and Google Docs

Amazon is already listing Chromebooks here.

Article source: CNET

 

These days, patent lawsuits have become the big guns that tech companies use to battle their competitors. But when it comes to Google’s WebM video technology, the company is trying to establish a neutral zone of patent peace.

Today, Google is announcing a program called the WebM Community Cross License initiative designed to dispel patent-related threats looming over freely usable video technology for the Web.

Under the effort, members who join agree to license any WebM-related patents to each other, a move that offers mutual reassurance that the technology is royalty-free in practice as well as in Google’s aspiration.

“Each grants to the other members a patent license for any patents that may be essential to WebM,” said Mike Jazayeri, Google’s director of product management for WebM.

So far Google has signed up 16 other organizations for the effort, some of them obvious allies such as browser makers Mozilla and Opera Software. But other allies, such as Samsung and LG Electronics, have video-related patents one could judge as commercially viable by virtue of their relevance to H.264, WebM’s biggest video encoding technology rival.

The effort is an attempt to counter doubts raised about the patent purity of WebM by MPEG LA, which licenses the H.264 patent pool and is investigating the creation of a similar pool for VP8, the video encoding technology that along with the Vorbis audio codec is the core of WebM. MPEG LA has said it believes VP8 violates others patents, though it hasn’t revealed any details.

Google hopes the WebM Community Cross License, combined with its own usage of WebM, will allay concerns.

“We felt comfortable in including it in our own products and services,” Jazayeri said, mentioning its YouTube video site and Chrome browser. “We’re hopeful the CCL will bring clarity and confidence” to those considering using WebM themselves.

If MPEG LA offered a VP8 patent pool, it might be convenient for some companies interested in using VP8 that are worried about potential lawsuits from patent holders. But it also would severely undermine Google’s ambition to create a patent-free technology. For example, it would preclude it from inclusion in open-source software such as Mozilla’s
Firefox and in standards such as HTML5 that seek to sidestep patent encumbrances.

“We genuinely believe the Web is as ubiquitous today as it is because the early founders made the core technologies of the Web open and freely usable,” Jazayeri said. “That’s critical.”

Many important video patent holders such as Microsoft, Panasonic, Philips Electronics, Sharp, and Sony aren’t on the list, though–at least yet.

“This is just the beginning,” Jazayeri said. “We are in active discussions [to] engage those who benefit from the Web ecosystem.”

The full list of partners so far is:

• AMD
• Cisco Systems
• Google
• HiSilicon Technologies (for itself and on behalf of its parent, Huawei)
• LG Electronics
• Logitech
• Matroska
• MIPS Technologies
• Mozilla Corporation
• Opera Software
• Pantech
• Quanta Computer
• Samsung
• STMicroelectronics (for itself and its affiliate, ST-Ericsson)
• Texas Instruments
• Verisilicon Holdings
• Xiph.Org Foundation

Google has taken other measures to promote WebM. It’s removed H.264 support from Chrome, putting its browser in the Mozilla and Opera camp rather than the Internet Explorer and Safari camp when it comes to HTML5 video built straight into Web pages. It’s also begun transcoding all uploaded YouTube videos into WebM–a mammoth task from a computing standpoint–and already has transcoded the most popular videos such that 99 percent of what’s seen on YouTube can be seen in WebM.

It remains to be seen how effectively Google can counter MPEG LA. Google is hoping to marshal allies under the banner of an unencumbered Internet.

“I think the comments they’ve made at this stage aren’t helpful to innovation on the Web, and I think others share that concern,” Jazayeri said.

To prevail, though, Google and its allies will have to convince others that the commercial value of a livelier Web outweighs the commercial value of any WebM-related patents they have. Today’s explosion of patent suits suggests that tech giants with big patent portfolios might not be so eager to lay down their weapons.

Article source: CNET

 

When most people think of small or medium business, they instantly think of the shops and stores in their local community.  While these businesses certainly represent a certain portion of small business, there is a much more important segment to consider . . . and that segment is the single person home-based business.  Why is this segment so important?  It is important because anybody can start a home based business and scale it into a vehicle for generating recurring cash flows.  One of the most compelling mediums for this brand of home based business is the internet.  By building a web-based small business, it can allow you to leverage technology as an accelerator for innovation and create a unique product or service for your customers.

One of the most important advantages for a web-based small business is the low cost of doing business.  Web hosting plans can be acquired for very reasonable amounts, open source software exists that can satisfy most small business needs for an extremely low cost, and the web allows you to reach millions upon millions of people simultaneously.  Naturally, you will need to create a compelling product or service to market but once that has been built, the web offers a highly compelling medium for connecting you with the marketplace.

The most unusual thing about the marketplace of ideas is that nobody can predict what will become the “next big thing.”  Many people assume that their idea will catch on big very quickly, borrow money to invest in their new idea, discover something that they had not anticipated, and proceed to lose all of the money that had been borrowed.  In response to this, some people begin to seek “get rich quick” schemes that promise fast wealth to help them repay their outstanding debts.  Inevitably, the “get rich quick” idea fails to deliver on its escalated promises and the would-be entrepreneur is now mired in a mountain of debt.  This unfortunate cycle repeats itself for all too many people each and every year.  However, this unfortunate chain of events does not need to occur.

By ‘boot-strapping’ new ideas off the ground as small businesses that run with extremely low costs, it gives entrepreneurs the opportunity to test out new ideas in the marketplace before making large investments.  The importance of this strategy is that it allows you the freedom to fail without bankrupting your financial future.  By failing while the cost is low, it provides crucial insights that pave the road to future success.  Thus, the true power of a home-based business is that it provides a laboratory for entrepreneurs to test their ideas and learn the key skills of building and running a small business.

In this way, you can use a home-based business to ‘tinker’ with new ideas and business models.  It is possible that some of these ideas will fail or need significant revision before they meet with success.  This process of ‘tinkering’ or ‘trial and error’ is the method by which the marketplace generates new and innovative businesses.  Do not be discouraged with roadblocks, stumbling points, mistakes, or outright failure.  There is a popular statement that states anything that does not kill you makes you stronger.  This sentiment is a very important part of the mindset for entrepreneurs, as it demonstrates a willingness to learn from life’s experiences and apply the knowledge gained to build the foundation of future success.  The key in all of this is to learn from every experience in your life, and ensure that failure occurs on a small enough scale to be educational, instead of catastrophic.

The small, home-based business that you create may end up propelling you to more prosperity than you had ever imagined.  The only way that you can find out is to start building a business and learn the fundamentals of success.  While you are climbing the ladder of success, do not fear failure.  Learn and understand the fundamental principals of success.  Once those principals are put into practice, there is no telling where the future will take you.