Exasperated Calculator

Strange thing: right this moment, I’m the top result in Google for ‘promoted to EL2‘.

Update: Ooh, and I’m 6th for ‘treasury EL2‘.

Search engine turned portal-omnivore Google has a reputation as being an ethical company. The informal corporate motto is “Don’t Be Evil”. But two stories today have made me start to wonder if maybe the ‘magic of the market’ has done its bit, and Google is starting to behave like pretty much any old monopolist.

First, Jeremy Zawodny spots Google stealing some content:

[T]hey decided to basically copy our page and slightly Googlify it. If you look, the design, layout, and most of the text are the same!

And then Tech Crunch reports on Google’s move into radio ads, and the hurt feelings at a competitor:

He [Voices.com CEO David Ciccarelli] claims the Google ad product is nearly identical, although he hasn’t seen it yet and has nothing to go on but the CNET quote above. But he also says that for the last couple of months traffic to the site from Mountain View (where Google is headquartered) has gone through the roof, accounting for about 5% of total voices.com traffic. He’s suggesting that Google has scoured the voices.com site to figure out what to copy in the Voices.com business model.

Neither of these two stories by themselves is very remarkable. Web designs get copied all the time, and it’s very unlikely this was the deliberate decision of any of the senior executives (like Microsoft’s recent embarrassment is likely just one rogue designer). And it’s a rough business out there, but competition is fair game. Just because you got there first doesn’t mean you own the land (AltaVista, anyone?).

But together these stories give a sleazy feel that goes against the image Google has been trying to paint. It looks like the company is getting a bit too big to control, the feature sprawl is getting a bit too broad to be properly policed, and the quality is suffering as diminishing returns set in on the staff.

So what’s going on here?

Google is a really good search engine, but nothing else it’s done has really impressed me except email. Google ‘gets’ search, and has come up with some good advertising solutions. The other businesses seem to be attempts to create greater traffic to their site, and to create new revenue streams that are increasingly far removed from their core business of web search.

None of the core search engine business really justify the price to earnings ratio the stock price implies at the moment: 53.1, compared to a ’sane’ figure of around 15-20. That kind of share price suggests that investors are expecting massive growth in future earnings. Given that Google is at maturity in the search engine business (with little market share left to take), that growth can only come adding new businesses to Google. Or, to put it another way, investors are implicitly expecting earnings to quadruple, which even YouTube isn’t going to do on its own.

So this makes Google a shark: it can’t stop swimming, or it’ll die. Every month Google needs to be doing something that expands its business, makes its revenues larger, and makes the investors confident that it’ll keep growing. As soon as they stop swimming, the share price is going to take a sharp, dramatic dive.

But sharks can’t stop to be nice. Google can’t afford to be “not evil” now, if being “not evil” causes it to lose any of these opportunities to expand revenue. The wedge will be thin at first, with these kind of mild, almost unnoticeable offences. But they have to grow over time, the imperative of the stock market (and the insane valuation of Google) demands it.

It’s a bit sad really, and it would’ve been nice if Google hadn’t become the single-stock manifestation of the bad-old-days of the late 1990s tech boom, but it’s pretty inevitable now. We can just hope that a pretty good search engine sticks around once all the dust has settled.

From Barista is this incredible photo of the Victorian fires:

Weight: 112.1kg

Weight: 112.4kg

ABC News Online:

One of the world’s biggest manufacturers of condoms is targeting New Zealand to test its new range of products because the people there are apparently among the most sexually active in the world. [...] Past surveys suggest Kiwis are among the most sexually active in the world, among the highest in the world for sexual partners and one-night stands, as well as being relatively more adventurous when it to comes to experimenting in the bedroom.

Weight: 111.4kg

Updates on the shows from my earlier post:

• Jericho: Still not watching…
• Vanished: Didn’t entice me back.
• Smith: Still canceled.
• The Class: Every time I say ‘I’m giving up on this’, the show redeems itself with some really good, really dark writing. Still right on the edge every episode, but hanging on so far. But not a ‘must see’.
• Men in Trees: Continues to be entertaining, although I’m about 4 episodes behind now.
• Help Me Help You: Nope, too much focus on the Ted Danson character, and not enough on the other interesting people in the group therapy session. Gave up on it.
• The Nine: Not enough in it to sustain the premise, I gave up a few minutes before it got effectively canceled.
• Ugly Betty: Still entertaining, but the backlog is also building up a bit.
• Heroes: Just gets better and better every week. The best TV that I’ve seen in years and years. I’ll write a longer review in a few days, I hope.
• Studio 60: Distressingly uneven, with way too much tendency for Aaron Sorkin to take revenge on those who have ‘wronged’ him in the past, with every character standing for someone in his life. Plus the comedy bits just aren’t very funny. Still, enough to keep me interested.
• Friday Night Lights: Still keeping up there, very very good stuff (although it’s now dropped to second behind Heroes for the best show of the season).

And the two new shows since last time:

• 30 Rock: Great talent (Tina Fey in particular), but the delivery of this show is very strange. It’s very much a poor corporate vehicle of a show, with intermittent sparks of good writing overwhelmed by very poor, very cliched writing for most of it. Gave up after about 3 episodes.
• 20 Good Years: Intermittently funny, but nothing really new. A waste of a couple of very good actors.

Well, that’s it for now. I’ll try and get reviews up for Heroes, Friday Night Lights and Studio 60 sometime before the end of January, and then a recap at the end of the US TV season.

Weight: 111.7kg

As people who’ve heard me complain know, I often refer to the enormous four wheel drive vehicles cluttering our roads as ‘Land Yachts’, to reflect the pointless ostentation they represent. But a bit more common is referring to them as a tank. So do they actually compare?

(a): Length x Width x Height

So: yes, some 4WD’s are as big as a tank. Not quite the same in weight, though. And a fairly small tank…

Weight: 111.6kg

Quick review of Casino Royale, which I went to see last night. Overall, liked it a lot. The first half has some great action sequences, but the second half is the overall better movie. Good acting, and Daniel Craig is one of the most impressive Bond’s ever: after 20-some movies it’s nice to see a bit of a new take on the whole thing. Go see it!

Weight: 111.4kg

Yes, I was one of the sad multitudes who stayed up past midnight to buy the new Nintendo Wii. I regret nothing!

Haven’t had much of a chance to play with it, just a brief wrestle with the internet settings (no luck yet, but I’ll get there), and a few rounds of baseball, boxing and bowling in the Wii Sports game. So far pretty impressed, although that could just be the sleep deprivation…

Weight: 111.8kg

There are some very strange things in the world, but these Cold War Unicorns take the cake.

That said, I’m strangely tempted by this:

Weight: 111.6kg

(No spoilers review)

A couple of weeks ago now I went to see The Prestige, the new movie from Christopher Nolan (director of Batman Begins, Insomnia and Memento, all great movies). Overall, it’s a very strange, complex movie that I greatly enjoyed, although Helen not so much…

Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale, who also played Batman in Nolan’s recent film) play a pair of magicians with a fierce, dangerous rivalry. They compete in particular with continuous elaborations of a trick named “The Transported Man”. The film jumps around in time with great complexity, and if you don’t watch closely you could easily get lost. But then the movie does start with Cutter (Michael Caine, in another great performance as Michael Caine) saying “Are you watching closely?”.

The performances are great, and the plot is intricate (if a little shakey at times). As the complexities grow the great, strange Nikolas Tesla makes an appearance (played by an unrecognisable David Bowie), and things get odder and odder from there.

This isn’t a film for everyone, but it is very enjoyable for the right person. Highly recommended if you are the right person.

(As for the title, well Cutter explains it best: “Every great magic trick consists of three acts. The first act is called “The Pledge”; The magician shows you something ordinary, but of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn”; The magician makes his ordinary some thing do something extraordinary. Now if you’re looking for the secret… you won’t find it, that’s why there’s a third act called, “The Prestige”; this is the part with the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance, and you see something shocking you’ve never seen before.”)

Weight: 111.4kg

Just got an email from my ISP (the fabulous Internode) to tell me that my upgrade to ADSL2 will be happening sometime next week. Should pretty much quadruple my internet connection speed, which will be very nice indeed.