Google Plus was about community and collaboration and killing it damaged users

Anti-trust law keeps large companies from stifling competition. Could consumer-protection law keep companies from simply killing services that many people depend upon?

Google Plus chief architect Vic Cundotra "sold" the project to Google CEO Larry Page by convincing him that Facebook was an existential threat and, when Google Plus was launched, Facebook took it as an existential threat and responded accordingly.

Both were wrong, because, while they overlapped functionally, they were not direct competitors. Facebook serves a social feed of posts from family, friends, and people an algorithm identifies as being like you. Google Plus also offered a feed but was more about collaboration and support of communities of common interest.

J. C. R. Licklider, who was responsible for much of the research that led to interactive computing and the Internet, anticipated Google Plus Communities by over 40 years, writing that interactive communities would "consist of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities not of common location, but of common interest."

I barely use Facebook but did use Google Plus. I didn't pay much attention to my Google Plus feed but used Google Plus Communities extensively. I have an interest in the Cuban Internet, so created a Google Plus Community on the topic and joined several other Cuba-related communities. I also joined communities on other topics I am interested in, like the Internet in developing nations and satellite Internet service.

I am also a teacher and created a Community each semester for my students to share material relevant to our class and study together. My students and I also used Google Plus Hangouts on Air for collaboration and coordination.

At the start, Google Plus was not just a social feed -- it was a collection of services that also included Photos, Hangouts, and Communities. Google separated Photos and Hangouts before they killed Google Plus and could have separated Communities as well, but they did not.

Would Google Communities have been viable as a stand-alone service? Yes. The closest competitor would have been Facebook Groups, but Groups lacks key features like post categories and the Communities user interface was far superior to that of Groups. Revenue sources could have included community-member data, ads, an optional membership fee, etc.

What about fake news, spam and toxic filter bubbles? It's easier to manage those things when the unit of scrutiny is a community rather than posts in a social feed. A community will have a creator and perhaps one or more moderators. They would be the first line of defense against inappropriate content within a community. The operator of the community platform would guard against communities that were intended to violate platform rules.

If they decided not to operate Communities as a separate service, Google could have offered the code and data assets for sale to others or at least put the code in the public domain. Evidentally it was easier for them just kill Communities along with the social feed, but doing so damaged me and other users. I don't know how many Communities there were or how many members they had, but killing Google Plus caused the loss of a large amount of social and monetary capital.

Over the years, Google has killed 137 services, 12 apps, and 12 hardware offerings, beginning with Google Deskbar after a three-year run in 2006. Anti-trust law keeps large companies from stifling competition. Could consumer-protection law keep companies from simply killing services that many people depend upon?

Such a law would not be all bad for Google. If constrained, they would still recoup some of the value of their investment and it would instill confidence in other companies that were thinking of offering products that depended upon them. If I were a developer, I would be reluctant to build a product that depended upon Google with its track record of killing 161 offerings in 13 years. Google Plus also had a symbiotic relationship with other Google services. For example, Google Plus drove some Blogger and YouTube traffic.

Elizabeth Warren and others have suggested breaking up large Internet companies. If we do so, let's not throw away all of the pieces.

Open data leads to competition

When evaluating proposed mergers and breakups, control of data should be considered along with market impact.

In a previous post, I spoke of Amazon's use of customer and market data in restraint of trade, but they are not alone. For example, leaked internal documents show that plans to sell access to user data were discussed for years and received support from Facebook’s most senior executives. Facebook gave Amazon extended access to user data because Amazon was spending money on advertising and partnered with them on the launch of the Fire smartphone. In another case, Facebook discussed cutting off access to user data for a messaging app that had grown too popular and was viewed as a competitor.

As former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler points out in a recent post, proprietary data is a source of market control and he cites two examples where opening data has led to competition. In the US, a law mandating open access to video content enabled satellite companies to compete with cable companies and in the UK, open access to customer banking data led about 200 organizations to offer new services in its first year.

Wheeler's position is elaborated in Unlocking Digital Competition, a report from the Digital Competition Expert Panel convened by the British Treasury Department. Their data-related recommended actions are:

• Establishing data mobility and open standards between services: overcoming network effects which cause markets to tip by requiring systems to ‘talk’ to each other using open, standardised formats. This will mean consumers can port their data between networks, interact with users on other, similar networks, and smaller firms can plug their services into those of bigger ones. New business opportunities will open up that use, manage, and combine data made available. Consumers, in turn, will have new choices of digital services, with switching made much easier.
• Securing access to non-personal and anonymised data: tackling the data barrier to entry for smaller and newer firms, while protecting privacy. The power of bulk data driving economies of scale and scope is a key reason new firms struggle to compete and bring innovative services to consumers. Overcoming this barrier will allow the digital economy to remain dynamic.

These are only two of the 20 recommended actions in the 140-page report. Those actions are grouped under six strategic recommendations for the government:

• Sustain and promote effective competition in digital markets, by establishing a pro-competition digital markets unit, tasked with securing competition, innovation, and beneficial outcomes for consumers and businesses.
• Take more frequent and firmer action to challenge mergers that could be detrimental to consumer welfare through reducing future levels of innovation and competition, supported by changes to legislation where necessary.
• Update and effectively use tools against anti-competitive conduct to help them play their important role in protecting and promoting competition in the digital economy.
• Continue to monitor how the use of machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence evolves to ensure it does not lead to an anti-competitive activity or consumer detriment, in particular to vulnerable consumers.
• Conduct a market study into the digital advertising market encompassing the entire value chain, using its investigatory powers to examine whether competition is working effectively and whether consumer harms are arising.
• Engage internationally on the recommendations it chooses to adopt from this review, encouraging closer cross-border co-operation between competition authorities in sharing best practice and developing a common approach to issues across international digital markets.

The two open-data actions mentioned above fall under the first strategic recommendation of promoting competition, but control of data is involved in the others as well. When Amazon acquired Zappos and Whole Foods, they gained access to data on relatively affluent shoppers. Facebook's acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp and Google's acquisition of Waze also yielded data in addition to eliminating competition. The machine learning recommendation involves training data. When evaluating proposed mergers and breakups, control of data should be considered along with market impact.

The last strategic recommendation -- international engagement -- recognizes the global nature of the Intenet. (Note that the Digital Competition Expert Panel was chaired by an American). Nations like China and the US have different goals with respect to competition, but democratic, capitalist nations should strive to adopt compatible institutions and policies. In the era of Brexit and MAGA, we need to work with other nations -- I'd rather end up with two Internets than fifty.

Google balloons and Telesat satellites

Telesat will use Google's network operating system. Will Google get access to data? A global backbone?

Loon balloons float at an altitude of around 20 km -- above
birds and the weather. They navigate by moving up or
down to catch wind currents moving in different directions. 

Telesat is making progress. Within the last month, they announced a launch contract with Blue Origin, a successful antenna test with Ball Aerospace and completion of system requirements reviews, but perhaps more interesting is an agreement to use the software defined network (SDN) platform Google has developed for their Project Loon.

Google has been interested in connectivity for underserved areas for many years, and have investigated and invested in non-terrestrial solutions using satellites, blimps, drones and balloons. Project Loon uses constellations of balloons in the stratosphere. They began working on it in 2011, provided emergency connectivity in Peru in 2016 and Puerto Rico in 2017 and are slated to begin commercial deployment in Kenya later this year.

Like LEO satellites, Loon balloons are in constant motion relative to the Earth and each other and the Loon SDN "schedules, predicts, controls and optimizes the wireless topology, radio resources, and routing of packets across the ground and aerospace segments of non-geostationary networks." The satellites and balloons are at different altitudes and move at different speeds, but the network characteristics are similar and Google will adapt their SDN for Telesat's satellite constellation.

Nothing was said about the terms of the deal. Since Google is also an investor in SpaceX, they now have an interest in two of the three large LEO satellite Internet-service projects. In addition to being paid to develop and maintain Telesat's SDN and getting a return on their SpaceX investment, they might be getting access to the data flowing through the networks or to a global backbone.

Softbank invested a billion dollars in OneWeb's satellite-Internet project for access to data. Softbank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son outlined his vision of the future in the keynote session of the 2017 SoftBank World conference. He believes the information revolution will be driven by strong, general artificial intelligence (AI), therefore the key material asset for the information age will be AI training data. His conclusion is "whoever gets the most data wins." Google uses data for AI training and for advertising.

Another intriguing possibility is that Google and Telesat might be planning to integrate their balloon and satellite networks. One can imagine Project Loon using Telesat's satellite network as a global backbone. That integration would be facilitated by their both running the same SDN software -- the same network operating system.

Whatever the motivation, this partnership provides Telesat with a strategic software asset and Google may gain access to data and a fast, global backbone.

For progress reports on the three LEO broadband projects, see OneWeb, Telesat and SpaceX.

Check this short Project Loon video:

Update 6/5/2020

9to5 Google found an interesting Google Careers listing for a “Partner Manager” whose role to “help launch a global satellite-based broadband service.” The partner will "support satellite broadband service providers, productize the solution and make it available to other satellite broadband ISPs.”

The ad does not specify which broadband ISPs the applicant is expected to support, but it could be SpaceX, where Google is an investor, Telesat, a network operating system customer, or both or others. One way or the other Google will win if LEO satellite broadband is a success. Amazon will win too.

Google -- kill Google Plus but save G+ Communities.

Last March, Google discovered a bug that exposed around 500,000 Google Plus profiles. Only static, optional profile fields like name, email address, occupation, gender, and age were exposed -- no other information like post content, Community memberships, viewing history, etc.

They discovered and immediately patched the bug last March and spent six months investigating it before going public yesterday. They say their investigation found "no evidence that any developer was aware of the bug or abusing it" and "no evidence that any profile data was misused." In spite of their assurance that no harm was done, Google stock dropped 2.6% last Thursday morning, when the news may have leaked out, and it is down about 4% for the last five days.

In the same post as they announced the bug, they announced they would "sunsetting" the consumer (free) version of Google Plus (but not the paid, enterprise version). Google or any other company has the right to discontinue an unprofitable product or service and, as they point out in their post, the "social network" portion of Google Plus was a failure, but there is more to Google Plus than social networking.

I quit reading my Google Plus feed long ago -- it was filled with spam and fake news based on my (faked) political interests, but I have found Google Plus Communities to be valuable and useful. While Google could not compete with Facebook's social networking feed, the features and interface of their Communities are superior to Facebook Groups. (Even if you like Facebook Groups, there is no way to transfer the members and history of a Google Plus Community to a Facebook Group).

Google should save Google Plus communities. There is a precedent for such a move. When it was launched, Google Plus included a service called Hangouts on Air (HoA). HoA enables video "chats" among up to ten people. That is not unique, but the chats can optionally be broadcast online and archived on YouTube. HoA was and remains a unique, valuable service that I and many others use. In 2016, Google removed HoA from Google Plus and integrated it into YouTube so it will not be affected by the elimination of Google Plus.

The decision to zap Google Plus provides a good example of the danger of dependency. There is an Internet saying -- "do what you do best and link to the rest." That makes sense and it has facilitated the rapid proliferation of Internet-based services, but it also leaves one vulnerable. The cost of using a service you depend upon may rise or one day or, like Google Plus, it may disappear.

I use HoA and Communities in my teaching and other professional work. Google saved me when they moved HoA out of Google Plus and I hope they do the same with Communities.

=====
Update 12/4/2018

Edward Morbius recently analyzed a random sample of 12,000 of the 7,974,281 Google Plus Communities. The size of the 10,358 Communities with visible membership ranged from 1-271,297 and the distribution was highly skewed -- the mean was 128.6, but the median was only 2.

Some Communities are worth saving, others are not. Communities with only one or two members are not worth saving, nor are communities with no recent activity (though they might have some archival value). Some topics should also be eliminated. For example, Morbius found many porn Communities in his sample and a Google algorithm should be able to flag and eliminate pornography. Spam users should also be detectable.

The largest Community in Morbius' sample had only 271,297 members, but there are much larger Communities. (I am a member of three Communities with over 500,000 members). Large Communities with non-spam traffic should be preserved. Small, active Communities are also valuable. For example, I create Communities for my classes. They are short-lived -- one semester -- and active relative to the number of members. They are quite useful to me and I do not know of a suitable alternative and I imagine the same is true for other finite-length projects.

How about opening a YouTube video production space in Havana?

YouTube has video production spaces in Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, New York, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris, Mumbai, and Toronto -- how about opening one in Havana?

In 2015 I wrote that Cuba was well positioned to produce Spanish-language entertainment and education content and suggested that they open a YouTube production space in Havana.

The idea of opening a production space in Havana makes even more sense today than it did in 2015.

Google Global Cache (GGC) servers are now installed and operating on the Island. That means Google content can be viewed and uploaded faster than in 2015 and the result is that YouTube has made substantial gains since GCC went online last April:

YouTube gains since GCC went online (source)

There is also a growing, enthusiastic community of young Cuban YouTubers, several of whom are profiled in this YucaByte article and you can "meet" a few others in this short (5:36) video from Periodismo de Barrio:

(The YucaByte article also contains a short video sampler showing enthusiastic YouTubers).

Not exactly being a millennial myself, I am not likely to become a follower of these youthful YouTubers, but they are inheritors of a rich history of Cuban music, cinema and education.

Google executives and Senator Jeff Flake just met with Cuban president Diaz-Canel and former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt who said “We already have an agreement signed that allows easier access to data. We would like to do more.”

How about opening a YouTube video production space in Havana?

Vision precedes engineering prototypes which precede products

Google unveiled voice controlled "intelligent" assistants today -- in a phone and a home listening device.



The vision of a voice-controlled intelligent assistant in which the manufacturer made tightly integrated hardware and software was shown in Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept video.



We'll see if Google has pulled it off.

Brick and mortar stores -- Apple, Microsoft and Google?

Dell, HP and others now have relatively upscale Chromebooks that approach, and in some features surpass, the high end Google Pixel and Google just announced that Chromebooks will be running Android apps in the future. At first, those apps might not be optimized for the Chromebook form factor, but many will look good in phone or tablet-size windows and I bet we see Chromebook-friendly Android apps in the future.

Given all that, I thought I might like to get one, so I headed over to the closest thing I know of to a Google store -- the Google section of my local Best Buy.

It's a total Fail.

As shown here, all they had was half a dozen low-end machines. That might work for a Chromebook for a school child, but it is not sufficient for someone thinking of spending $700 or more.

But, it gets worse.

There were two, sweet, young sales people wearing Google shirts next to the Chromebooks, so I asked if they had other machines -- perhaps a Pixel -- somewhere else in the store. It turned out they didn't know what I meant by "Google Pixel." I explained what a Google Pixel was and one of them went off to inquire. When she came back, she said they did not have them.

Since I was there, I asked about the six machines they had on display and discovered that they were confused about the difference between memory and storage. None of the machines on display had more than 2GB of memory, but they assured me that that was no problem because you could attach a large external hard drive.

(In the early days of personal computers, there was a joke that the difference between computer store sales people and car sales people was that the car sales folks knew they were lying).

I don't know if these kids were Google or BestBuy employees, but they were wearing Google shirts and that surely cheapens the top-notch "Googler" brand.

If Google hopes to sell and support high-end hardware, they will have to do much better than this, and that will be expensive.

A little while ago, I had been in a shopping mall near my home and dropped in on the Apple and Microsoft stores, which are just a few stores apart.

It was the middle of the week, but the Apple store was quite crowded. Customers were talking with sales people, playing around with machines, getting help from Apple "geniuses," etc. Apple runs classes in the stores, offers walk-in customer support and the employees are knowledgeable and helpful. I snapped this picture just before the man in the foreground told me to stop taking pictures:

I walked over to the Microsoft store and found it to be pretty well empty -- the store employees outnumbered the customers. They had a wide range of computers on display -- from both Microsoft and OEMs. They also offered service and classes and the workers were as knowledgeable and friendly as those in the Apple store. There was no pressure and no problem playing around for as long as I wanted to and they were happy to have me take pictures.

I had visited the same Microsoft and Apple stores two days after Christmas in 2014 and, while both were more crowded post Christmas, the Apple store was totally jam packed and the Microsoft store still fairly empty.

I personally don't see much difference between the Microsoft and Apple stores and can't figure out why one is so much more popular than the other, but, I can tell you for sure that Google will have to be creative and spend a lot of money if they want to sell us high end hardware. They will also have to step up customer support. You can sell a $35 Chromecast in a BestBuy store or online, but not a $1,300 Pixel Chromebook.

Google's OnHub WiFi router is a strategic product

During the second quarter of 2015, Google reported selling $16.023 billion worth of advertising -- 11% more than the second quarter of 2014. Advertising is their bread and butter, but "other sales" grew by 17% to $1.704 billion.

I don't know how "other sales" breaks down, but a chunk of that is hardware devices like the Pixel Chromebook, Chromecast, Next thermostat, Nexus phone and, now, WiFi routers.

Google's first WiFi router, the OnHub, is being built by Chinese manufacturer TP-Link and ASUS will have one later this year.

With the exception of the Chromecast, Google seems to be going for high end devices, but does the world need another $200 home router? Why would Google bother? I can think of a couple of strategic reasons.

For one, Google has an eye on the home automation market -- controlling things like their Next thermostat and your TV set. The OnHub has the potential to become a network-connected home automation hub -- like the Amazon Echo -- which sits in your living room and listens for commands like "turn on the bedroom lights" and "lock the front door."

The OnHub lacks the Echo's microphone, but maybe the ASUS device or OnHub v2 will take care of that.

The second strategic advantage is that, since the device is online, Google will be able to dynamically tune it for maximum performance. Google will be able to monitor your network and change GoHub parameters and firmware. You will also be able to control the network more effectively, for example, giving a streaming video in the den priority over email in your home office.

Being able to improve your WiFi performance is a nice feature and, the more time you spend online and the less time you spend waiting for content, the more ads Google will be able to show you.

-----
Update 8/24/2015

There are many comments on this post on the Slashdot Web site. Some worry about Google's ulterior motives:

They want to be able to mine your data at the lowest possible level, have a handy backdoor available in case the NSA comes calling, and so they can insert their own ads on every page of every website you ever browse.

There is no way in hell you should be trusting a Google which has remote access to your network, home automation, doors and every other thing Google thinks they're going to sell you.

They want to control your network. They want to inject advertising into everything you do. They want you to have no choice but to use DNS servers they control.

Trying to inject advertising into your internet stream would be a ham-handed approach the idiots at Lenovo would try. Google is more clever than to slit their own device's throat with something so stupid as that. (Note that Lenovo was caught injecting ads and I suggested that selling more ads would be a nice side-effect of improving speed, but agree that Google would not inject ads on their own).

These worries are contradicted by this comment:

I know a couple of people who were involved in the development of OnHub and, FWIW, they say that the motivation was that there's a need for a Wifi router that performs better and is more secure. Not a strategic bet, just a perceived market opportunity which they thought Google was well-equipped to fill.

With regard to performance, the antenna design of the OnHub is supposed to be dramatically better than anything else on the market, and the device incorporates ideas from the Software Defined Networking stacks Google developed internally for its data centers, to optimize data flow. I wouldn't have thought there was much you could do to make Wifi work better, since the ISP connection is generally the bottleneck, but apparently there is. With respect to security, it adopts a number of ideas from ChromeOS, plus fully-automated updates. Probably the biggest security benefit compared to the competition is that security is actually a primary design goal, which isn't the impression I get from makers of home routers.

We'll see if OnHub actually is enough better than the competition to justify its premium price. Based on what I know of the people working on it I expect that it will. I ordered one.

Check Slashdot out -- there are many more comments.

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Update 9/3/2015

The FCC is considering new rules that would ban WiFi firmware modification. I guess the FCC is worried about hacking or perhaps increasing power beyond legal limits, but, if passed, the regulations would limit the ability of companies like Google and Amazon to upgrade their Internet-connected home hubs.

The FCC is open for comments on this proposal through early morning, September 8.

Google and Facebook report on developing world connectivity at Mobile World Congress

I've been studying and working on the Internet in developing nations since 1991 when only a few nations had any sort of Internet connection, as shown in Larry Landweber's 1991 connectivity map:

Every nation is connected today, but the digital divide remains as deep as it was in 1991. Both Facebook and Google are working to bring the 3-4 billion people who do not have Internet connectivity online and they described their efforts at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Google

Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Android, Chrome and Apps at Google Inc., updated the audience on two projects -- Project Loon and Project Link.

Project Loon seeks to deploy a constellation of balloons at an altitude of around 20 kilometers -- above the mountains, air traffic and weather.

The balloons will be airborne routers able to communicate with end users, each other and Internet back-haul locations.

Pinchai said the balloons now average more than six months in the air and keep nearby smartphones operating at 4G or LTE speeds, around 10 megabits per second. “We are well on our way to a platform that, by the end of the decade, will touch 4 to 5 billion people.”

He also gave a progress report on Project Link in Kampala, Uganda where they have installed over 800km of fiber, creating an urban backbone.

As is often the case with municipal networks (as in Stockholm), Google is not a retail Internet service provider, but provides wholesale connectivity to retailers. Pichai said they would be expanding Project Link -- installing fiber backbones "many more" African cities this year.

For more on the Kampala deployment and a thoughtful analysis of the reason for its success, see this post by Steve Song.

Facebook

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about Internet.org, which hopes to make basic internet services affordable, so everyone with a phone can join the knowledge economy.

While Google is working on long range projects (including an investment in Elon Musk's SpaceX project to provide Internet service using low-earth orbit satellites), Internet.org is already up and running in Ghana, Columia, Kenya, Tanzania, Indonesia and India.

Facebook and their Internet.org partners are focusing on improving traditional terrestrial cell phone technology by improving mobile infrastructure, mass producing cheap, powerful cell phones and caching and compressing data. Their partners reflect this orientation – phone manufacturers, Opera, a Web software company, and Mediatek, a fabless semiconductor company.

Note that they want to provide only “basic Internet services,” not access to the open Internet. For example, in India they offer access to Facebook and 37 other web sites.

Facebook also has a Connectivity Lab lab working on more exotic, long-range solutions.

Short videos on Project Loon and Internet.org

Project Loon:



Internet.org:



-----
Update 4/10/2015

Mark Zuckerberg spoke at a business conference being held in conjunction with the Summit of the Americas in Panama City yesterday. He announced that Internet.org would be available in Panama and stated that eventually expanding into Cuba “definitely fits within our mission.” (Recall that Internet.org provides “basic Internet services" -- access to leading Web sites -- not access to the open Internet).

Google testing high-speed wireless -- the last kilometer for Google Fiber?

Google could even take the Android approach -- make the technology available to municipal governments and others and watch their advertising business grow as it is deployed.

In 2012, Goldman Sachs analyst Jason Armstrong looked at Google Fiber and estimated that it would cost them $70 billion to connect less than half of all US homes. He also estimated that it had cost Verizon $15 billion to bring FIOS fiber to 17 million homes. Armstrong concluded that he was "still bullish on cable, although not blind to the risks." (Armstrong has since left Goldman Sachs and works at Comcast and Verizon has cut back on FIOS).

That sounds grim, but what if wireless technology could significantly reduce the cost of connecting homes and offices?

Google has asked the FCC for permission to conduct tests of millimeter wave-length wireless communication for 180 days.

As shown below, short wavelength, high frequency (E-band) signals travel relatively short distances and can not pass through walls or other obstructions, but they enable gigabit and faster data transmission rates:

E-band wireless in context: The current market is dominated by a few companies selling equipment for cell phone backhaul and other point-to-point applications, but what if the smart guys at Google could figure a way to use it for neighborhood links? (Image: E-band communications.)

How much of Armstrong's $70 billion estimate would Google (or anyone else) save if they could run fiber to the block or neighborhood and reach individual homes using this radio technology?

Google Fiber started in Kansas City and today it is available in two other cities (and some surrounding areas). They are currently evaluating 34 additional cities and those cities would look a lot more attractive if they were able to use wireless links to reach homes from neighborhood poles. Google fiber could also provide backhaul for mobile communication.

If this dream materialized, Google would provide stiff competition to the incumbent phone and cable companies and drive connectivity prices down, but would that be the best solution for the public?

In the US, most of us have only one or perhaps two competing Internet service providers. Google would be a second or third, but we would still have an oligopoly and, while Google may not "do evil" today, who knows about the future?

Google, Comcast or any other ISP must deal with local government for things like access to tunnels, phone poles and utility boxes. Might we not be better off in the long run if local government owned the infrastructure regardless of the technology? This solution has worked well in Stockholm, Sweden, where the municpality owns the infrastructure and sells wholesale access to ISPs who service customers.

What will Google do if this technology works out? They could become nationwide wholesale or retail ISPs or even take the Android approach -- make the technology available to municipal governments and others and watch their advertising business grow as it is deployed.

All of this is highly speculative, but if the technology and business model work out, we may be able to get low-cost gigabit connectivity without moving to Kansas City.

-----
Update 4/16/2016

The FCC has granted Google an experimental license for terrestrial and airborne high-frequency wireless tests. The grant is effective March 17, 2016, through April 1, 2018, and covers 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz frequencies.

The airborne experimentation may be for Google's Project Loon and the terrestrial experimentation may be for high-speed short-range wireless link in densely populated neighborhoods (like the street where I live :-).

Google buys a satellite company -- Skybox Imaging -- why and what next?

This acquisition is ostensibly a data play, not a connectivity play, but couldn't a constellation of low-earth orbit Skyboxes cover the globe? Teledesic 2?

A few days ago, we looked at Google's efforts to bring connectivity to developing nations and rural areas using satellites and high altitude platforms.

Now, Google has acquired Skybox Imaging for $500 million. Skybox uses very small satellites orbiting at an altitude of 600 kilometers, which means they move at over seven kilometers per second relative to the surface of the Earth. Their technology is sufficiently advanced to compensate for that speed and produce videos that clearly show the movement of vehicles -- check this video:

Skybox Imaging HD Video of Las Vegas on March 25, 2014 (1080p) from Skybox Imaging on Vimeo.

Off hand, this seems more like a data gathering move than part of a developing nation and rural connectivity strategy -- they can use these images to look at traffic (for self-driving cars?), count ships in a port or cars in parking lots, etc. For examples, check this video:



But, they plan to launch many of these low-earth orbit satellites -- couldn't they be used for global connectivity as well? Several companies were formed to do just that in the 1990s. Bill Gates, Paul Allen and a Saudi prince backed the best-known one, Teledesic, but the technology of the time was not up to the task and the company failed.

Shifting emphasis, you can see an earlier video of the Skybox entreprenurial team presenting their vision at the Stanford Busiiness School here.

While this effort is not directly tied to providing connectivity, it beefs up Google's space technology and skills. Google is becoming a player in the space game along with Internet entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, and Richard Brnason's Virgin Galactic. There are rumors that Google is negotiating a stake in Virgin Galactic and one can't help thinking Musk and Bezos are watching all this with interest.

Update 6/14/2014

More cool Skybox Imaging videos

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Update 2/25/2017

Google has sold Skybox Imaging to Planet Labs, an Earth imaging company. My speculation about possible satellite-based Internet service was off base.

Office for the iPad -- too late? The browser is the next battleground.

Microsoft finally released Office for the iPad, but the iPad is four years old -- this announcement is long overdue. Preliminary reviews say they have done a good job on the touch user interface, but isn't that the last war?

The next war is not over the tablet or phone, but over the browser.

Don't take my word for it. In a 1997 Time interview (by Walter Isaacson) Bill Gates said:

Any operating system without a browser is going to be f****** out of business. Should we improve our product, or go out of business?

In 1998 he sent a memo to Microsoft executives saying:

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company...This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows.

I have been using a Chromebook for a week and I use Google Docs quite a bit, and, while I like both, am not ready to give up Windows. But, I bet there are a lot of folks who would abandon Windows if they could run Office in a browser.

What would have happened if Microsoft had released Office for the iPad, say, two years ago? It would have helped iPad sales and hurt Windows tablets for sure, but Windows tablets are not doing well regardless, and Microsoft and Office would have strengthened their dominant position with professional and enterprise users. Maybe they should have rebranded themselves the "software and services company" instead of "devices and services."

Now let's look forward, say, five years. I will have a gigabit Internet connection (well, not if Time Warner has their way) and my Chromebook will be very fast and compatible with HTML6. Will I want to use Office 365 and One Drive or Google Docs 2019 and Google Drive? Which one will my university or an enterprise settle on?

Today, Microsoft has the advantage of having many years of experience with Office and full-featured productivity applications. (Charles Simonyi, who worked on object-oriented programming on computers with bit-mapped displays at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, led the development of Word and Excel at Microsoft). They also have a solid grip on the enterprise.

Microsoft "got" bit mapped displays before Google existed, but Google "got" the Internet before Microsoft did and they have more experience with network infrastructure and applications with their data centers, Google Fiber and Google Docs/Drive. They've also got the chromebook and Chrome. (That being said, both may end up running on Mainframe 2 if that technology prevails).

I don't know which will "win" the browser battle (it may end a tie) and neither do the folks at Google and Microsoft -- and that is good news for us as consumers and citizens.

I love my Chromecast, but the radio is kind of lame.

I ordered a Chromecast right after they came out, but Amazon back ordered mine. It came a few days ago.

I plugged it in to my TV set, ran the setup and discovered that it could not connect to my home WiFi network. After fooling around with the base station position and antenna and using Google's short HDMI extender cable to move the Chromecast to the side a bit and change its orientation, I eventually established a weak (2 bar) connection.

I used Metageek's inSSIDer software running on my laptop to see the signal strength on the clearest 2.4 Ghz channel available in my TV room and, as you see here, it varied from -50 to -60db.

That is not a terrific signal, but I have a Roku box plugged into the same TV set and neither it or my laptop or my wife's iPad have difficulty connecting to the WiFi network from that room.

I looked online for radio sensitivity specs, and discovered that the folks at Tom's Hardware have speculated that the Chromecast uses an AzureWave AW-NH387 with 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth and FM radios. (If that is the case, I wonder if Google has plans for the Bluetooth and FM radios).

They came to that conclusion based on this photograph from Google's FCC Chromecast application:

(If you want to have some geek fun and see how they tested the device, check Google's report to the FCC).

Google's tests show that the Chromecast and its power supply satisfy FCC noise requirements, but I am still in the dark on the sensitivity of the radio.

Is there some way to get finer grained feedback on connection strength than the ill-defined "number of bars?" It would be nice if there were better specs so we could compare devices and guess ahead of time whether they would work in our locations. For now, I can only conclude that the radios in my laptop, my wife's iPad and our Roku box are better than the Chromecast radio. (By the way, a couple years ago, I found that the radio in my wife's iPad was weaker than my laptop radio).

Lest I end on a sour note, you should know that I love the Chromecast and expect to find Chromecasts connected to and built into many future TVs and boxes like my Roku. Chromecast radios will improve with time and I will upgrade my lame WiFi network to 802.11n. I won't be surprised if one day we find all sorts of "Chromecasts" plugged into formerly dumb, disconnected things like heaters, air conditioners, washing machines, etc.

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Update 9/12/2013

Google decided to place the Chromecast antenna inside the dongle case, which means it has to zig around chips and is constrained by the size of the case, so your WiFi reception will depend upon the location and orientation of the dongle itself. Luckily, I was able to get my Chromecast to connect to my home network by fiddling with its orientation and getting it away from the TV set using Google's short HDMI extender, but I was flying blind.

Anyone who has adjusted the rabbit ears on an analog TV set knows that reception varies with the orientation and position of the antenna -- you see the picture improve or get worse as you move the antenna. Unfortunately, the Chromecast gives you no feedback as you move it around.

If you succeed in connecting, Google displays the "strength" of the connection using "bars" like on your cell phone. But those bars are a course, undefined measure of signal strength and they are not shown while you are adjusting the position of the Chromecast.

Google should let you monitor connection strength as you move the Chromecast around. The familiar bars would not be good enough -- you need something more precise like, say, a two digit number or a graphic meter of some sort. The user would not have to know what the meter was displaying, just that it increased or decreased with signal strength.

The dongle would need to be mounted on a swivel that mechanically constrained it once you found the optimal orientation.

Another alternative would be to use an external antenna something like this:

It seems that Google tried to emulate Apple with the Chromecast. It comes in a really nice box and all the user has to do is plug and play -- let's not bother them with details like signal strength and adjusting the antenna position. That is great when it works, frustrating when it doesn't.

Google and edX combine their strengths to form mooc.org

In previous posts, I've said universities and university systems (like mine) could host open source MOOC platforms from Google and MIT edX, allowing faculty and others to experiment with innovative educational technology -- to develop focused instructional modules to supplement their own courses or complete MOOCs.

Better yet, I've suggested that Google could offer a hosted service where individuals could do the same without support of their university -- a "YouTube" for MOOCs and modular teaching material.

It looks like we are moving in the direction of the second suggestion. Google and edX announce today that they will be collaborating on MOOC.org.

The service is slated to be available in mid 2014, and it sounds as though a lot of the details (including revenue sources) are yet to be decided, but open software, open data and collaboration are clear values of this non-profit entity.

You can read more in a Google blog post and an MIT press release. Here are a couple of quotes from each along with some parenthesized comments:

Google blog post

We support the development of a diverse education ecosystem, as learning expands in the online world. Part of that means that educational institutions should easily be able to bring their content online and manage their relationships with their students. (I hope they support individual teachers, students and non-academics who want to develop teaching material in addition to supporting educational institutions).

Today, Google will begin working with edX as a contributor to the open source platform, Open edX. (It sounds as though the edX and Google platforms will be combined. Some time ago, Stanford also rolled their MOOC effort into edX. Perhaps competition from Udacity and Coursera has been a factor in driving this consolidation.)

edX press release:

In collaboration with Google, edX will build out and operate MOOC.org, a new site for non-xConsortium universities, institutions, businesses, governments and teachers to build and host their courses for a global audience. (This sounds like "EdX for the rest of us" -- those who cannot afford edX fees and are not at elite universities).

Google shares our mission to improve learning both on-campus and online. Working with Google's world-class engineers and technology will enable us to advance online, on-campus and blended learning experiences faster and more effectively than ever before ... This new site for online learning will provide a platform for colleges, universities, businesses and individuals around the world to produce high-quality online and blended courses. MOOC.org will be built on Google infrastructure. (It sounds like Google is bringing their Hangout, Live Stream, YouTube, Plus, etc. infrastructure to the party).

The devil is, no doubt, in the details, but this combination of MIT's educational expertise and reputation, Google's vast infrastructure and the lofty goals of both organizations might turn out to be revolutionary.

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Update 9/18/2013

Mooc.org announced that they would be offering certified multi-course sequences as well as single courses. Do you think that this sort of thing might become more important than a traditional college degree in the job market? If so, for what sorts of jobs?

While I am glad to see them move in this direction, I also hope they make room for creating and discovering sub-course modules on focused topics. (I am a long-time modular teaching material nut).

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Update 11/4/2013

Stanford, which had committed to the edX platform some time ago, has announced additional support.
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Uppdate 12/1/2013

There is a discussion of this post on Slashdot.
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Update 12/16/2013

EdX drops plans to match students with potential employers. In a failed trial -- they tried to match 868 high-performing students with job openings and none got a job -- they ran into competition from traditional headhunters and codified hiring criteria in HR departments. They are considering other revenue generating options like licensing courses to universities and other types of organization (sounds a bit like the shift toward vocational training at Udacity) and hosting and supporting their open source course delivery platform. If they were to pursue the latter option, how would that impact their collaboration with Google at Mooc.org?

Google Chromecast delay -- production or legal or hardball?

It may have been a data input error or perhaps Amazon has been hacked, but I received an email on August 8 saying the Google Chromecast I had ordered on July 27 would be delivered in mid October.

I checked the Amazon Web site, and, sure enough they were now saying it "usually ships in 2-3 months:"

As we noted last week, the first production run sold out in a few days, and, at the time I placed my order, they said it would ship in 3-4 weeks:

On August 3, they seemed to be on schedule:

This is a simple electronic device -- why are they having so much trouble?  Why did the shipping date slip?  Are they poor production planners?  Having trouble getting parts?  Having legal problems? Playing hardball with Amazon?

If it is legal problems, it may be a trademark conflict with Chromecast.com, a Web development company.  Here is their Web site:

Note the link to legal information near the bottom of the screen.  Follow the link and you will see a lot of legal information.  There is also some very faint black-on-blue text at the bottom of the page.  It is illegible on my display, but here is what it says:

© 2013 Chromecast Inc. All rights reserved. Chromecast, Chromecast Digital Media, chromeTone, The rADium LDAP suite, and project|aurora, are trademarks of Chromecast Inc. and may not be used without written permission.

Did Google forget to get that written permission? If so, the can always change the name to "Metro."

Perhaps they are just playing hardball with Amazon.  It turns out the Google Play Web site still says the Chromecast ships in 2-3 weeks.  If they cut Amazon's quota to induce people like me to cancel their Amazon orders and order from the Google Play Store, they may gain a few sales, but, as a Google customer, that strikes me as doing evil.

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Update 8/9/2013

At first I thought my Amazon delivery date may have been an error, but a day later, Google is still promising 2-3 weeks for shipping, Amazon 2-3 months and Best Buy is just out of stock period:

This pisses me off a bit and must also rankle Amazon.  At $35, there cannot be much (any?) profit in a Chromecast, so it seems foolish.  I guess Google wants me to cancel my Amazon order, but I'll wait till Amazon ships it in October.

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Update 8/10/2013

Amazon sent out an email saying "customers who placed orders prior to August 7 should receive their orders in the coming weeks and into mid-September." The expected ship date for new orders remains 2-3 months.

The largest data center in Los Angeles sells for $437.5 million or $660 per square foot

From the outside, One Wilshire looks like an ordinary office building.  About a third of the building is occupied by offices, but the rest is an Internet exchange point and data center -- full of routers and servers belonging to about 300 voice and data service providers. It is the key US hub for connection to Asian undersea cables. That makes it some of the most expensive real estate in the world,  It just sold for $437.5 million.

Conduits rising from the pavement give a clue that this is not an ordinary office building.

LA Times photo

Moving inside, we see the "meet me room," where networks exchange data. This is one of twelve images in an exhibit by the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

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If you like lurking inside large data centers, check this photo tour of a Google data center.  Here s a sample image:

Chromecast blunders -- does Google need a few MBAs?

Google's new Chromecast, a device for streaming video on a TV set, might turn out to be terrific, but they have bungled the marketing and production.

I was on the Yet Another Tech Show podcast Wednesday and, based on what they had read, all the panelists agreed that Google's new Chromecast was a terrific product at a no-brainer price.  So, being a cord cutter, I ordered one.

After I placed my order, I learned that I had missed the deadline for a three-month Netflix credit premium. I was satisfied with the purchase at first, but now I am somewhat pissed at Google for giving all those folks who ordered a few days earlier a better deal.

It also turned out that Google blew the production planning -- my Chromecast is expected to ship in three or four weeks.

I came across a tweet saying that nearly 250,000 people had ordered them before the Netflix promotion was pulled -- who plans logistics and production?

I had to wait, but it will be worth waiting for, right? I hope so, but astute blogger Bob Cringley suspects that the Google demo overstated the capability of the Chromecast and when I checked the customer reviews on Amazon, I found that, while most are favorable, there is some dissent.  Some folks could not get it to work, experienced poor quality audio or video or discovered that they needed a second port to power the device if they had an older TV with pre-version 1.4 HDMI ports.

I didn't cancel my order -- I still hope to love the thing, but I can't help wondering if Google, with all their PhD engineers and scientists couldn't use a few more folks with MBAs in production management and marketing. Remember the Nexus Q?

Google Play Store for Education and the new 3Rs

Google announced Google Play for Education at Google I/O yesterday.

The store will be geared toward K-12 schools and organized by subject and grade, as shown here.

The apps will be focused on the Common Core State Standards which spell out the language and math skills and concepts students are expected to learn for success in college and careers.

The subject-grade organziation and focus on The Common Core, will make discovery of good apps relatively efficient.

The store will not be online till next fall, but they are encouraging developers to build apps now.  I'd be surprised if folks like The Khan Academy and MathisPower4U were not far down this path already. If they and independent developers and creative teachers begin building apps, we may see a loosening of the textbook publisher's grip. (Apple can't be too happy about this announcement either).

This is a K-12 Play store, but it sounds like it could be used as remedial source for today's university students -- you would be astounded by the math and language skills of many of today's undergraduates.

Some may chafe at the standardization and focus of Google Play for Education, but it only addresses a portion of the school day and the material is essential -- the 3Rs of our time.

The average lifespan of canceled Google services and APIs is 4 years

A lot of people, myself included, are upset at Google's decision to eliminate their RSS reader, Google Reader. Perhaps Charles Arthur was one of them, because he has just written an article reporting the lifespan of 39 canceled Google services and application programming interfaces (APIs).  It turns out that the mean life span of canceled projects is 1,459 days, just under four years. The article has a table listing the start and end dates of the 39 services and APIs.

I use Google Reader in my work and, until now, have been having my students use it.  We use other Google services even more -- Google Docs, Blogger, Google Plus and Hangouts are central to my teaching and other work. I would be happy to pay a reasonable fee to use those services, but would think twice about requiring my students to do so.

Google had their reasons to shut Reader down -- it saves them some (very small) percent of their infrastructure cost and frees up some people for other work, but it harms their reputation. The folks who are now having second thoughts about relying Google services and APIs tend to be active -- educators, journalists, IT professionals, application developers, etc. Alienating one of these folks is a bigger loss to Google than losing a casual user.

Google patents the network OS

Google has been awarded US patent #8,239,662 for "a system for providing an operating system over a network to a local device."

The patent describes the system architecture and goes on to make 3 independent and 15 dependent claims for protection, but how unique are those claims? There have been several "thin client" products and Oracle marketed their Network Computer. Furthermore, is downloading a program that is an operating system conceptually different than downloading a program that is a Web browser or word processor -- where exactly do you draw the line between an operating system and an application program?

I spoke with intellectual property attorney Thomas Ewing of Avancept LLC about those 18 claims and he pointed out that "the number of claims a patent has is only very loosely correlated with its inventiveness." He added that while multiple claims are common in the US, they are less so in other nations and that to infringe upon a dependent claim, one must also infringe upon its corresponding independent claim.

He noted that the patent examiners initially questioned the novelty of several claims in Google's application and it took two rounds of rejection and appeal to finally get the patent, but characterized this as a "fairly typical back and forth with the patent office." He also noted that the patent examiner cited references to prior art in 1 issued patent and 6 published applications (listed below).

Ewing said that to infringe a claim literally, someone would have to do everything listed in the claim. I would think that engineers working on a competing product could find work-arounds that would differentiate their work from Google's. “There is a possibility for arguing infringement under what’s known as ‘the doctrine of equivalents,’” he said, adding that such arguments are often difficult to win.

Ewing also mentioned that it is unusual for someone as senior as David C. Drummond, Google's Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer to sign the power of attorney for a patent application. He acknowledged that that may be standard procedure at Google, but, if is not, it may give us an indication of their commitment to the Chromebook.

With their Motorola acquisition, the Chromebook, Google TV, Nexus tablet and the quickly withdrawn Nexus Q, it looks like Google will end up a hardware manufacturer, heeding Alan Kay's advice that "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." They may also have noticed Apple's profit margins.

If you would like to really geek out on this patent, you can see all of the accompanying documentation by requesting information on patent number 8,239,662 at the Patent Office portal. I did so, and was impressed (and depressed) by the effort needed to secure the patent -- there are records of 46 transactions, 69 documents on file, 63 adjustments (some minor) made during the application process and contact information for 82 attorneys and agents (though only two attorneys actually filed the documents in the case).

Whether it is eventually upheld or not, this patent gives Google and its lawyers a weapon to use in the sad court fights that are so characteristic of today's computing scene.


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Prior art referenced by the patent examiner:

Patent:

• 7,343,560 - Method and system for generating dynamic images - owned by Novell

Applications:

• 20030126242 - Network boot system and method using remotely-stored, client-specific boot images created from shared, base snapshot image - owned by Compaq/HP
• 20040153694 - Reliability of diskless network-bootable computers using non-volatile memory cache - owned by Microsoft
• 20050091349 - Automatically configuring a computer - owned by SAP
• 20060010314 - Methods and systems for running multiple operating systems in a single mobile device - owned by Intellectual Ventures
• 20060047946 - Distributed operating system management - owned by MaxSP Corp.
• 20090083404 - Software Deployment In Large-Scale Networked Systems - owned by Microsoft