Don’t be evil ???

Nice sunny Sunday afternoon, I am thinking of Google. Google… Google... (Should spend productive hours for talking about Google to compensate my afternoon.) So, here I am.. Today, I would like touch upon three things about Google.


Firstly, I would like to talk about is ‘Android Mobile Phone Operation System’. Android is an open platform to be mounted on mobile device, developed by OHA (Open Handset Alliance) which consists of 34 global partners (inc Google). It’s known to be open as free of charge for users. Then what Google wants to achieve from this? As we all know, Google has expanded its platform by providing free service and the advertisements have been laid out a core strategy for profit. If we look at the data that users of mobile market exceeded 1 billon now, and expected to reach 3.1 billion in 2011 - easily we can guess that the mobile advertising market is the blue ocean to Google who has enough advertises with plentiful networks & contents. And, according to NPB Group, unit sales for Android OS ranked second among all smartphone OS handsets sold in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2010, following BlackBerry OS. However, the problems still Google has now are that it can’t guarantee compatibility of App by version and open source version (which is considered advantage) can serve as disadvantage to Google.


Let’s move on Google’s monopoly issue. As you can see from below, its market share is over 60%, mainly dominating web search market. (Data from ComScore Search Result posted on May 21). Based on the news from many sources, there are some on-going issues regards monopoly, and one of them is that EC (European Commission) tries to probe Google with anti-trust. Google may argue that it doesn’t deliberately discriminates contents at all, but its search engine produces result based on PageRank (Google algorithm). However, when I tried to find out some negative information of Google, well, I can rarely find. I don’t want to reach any conclusion that Google does have censorship of search results, but on the other hand, hardly deny that there is a chance of information manipulation. (Well, skeptically, this is the power of the dominant player in certain business market. )


Lastly, I would like to talk about Energy consumption of Google’s server. I haven’t thought about this issue before, but while I was searching of some news (One of them is ‘Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches’), I thought that this issue deserves careful consideration. Here, it says that Google is very efficient but it has a lot of extra capacity to produce CO2 by making searches fast. (Even without calculation, fundamentally, CO2 produced by each internet user and Google’s data center would be huge!) Google has been criticized for the high amount of energy used to maintain its servers. Therefore, Google has pledged to spend millions of dollars to investigate cheap, clean, renewable energy. This action should be continued as a way of CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility).


Well, we can talk about other issues – Intellectual property, China issue, but let’s call it a day here.


Ciao
E