De :
Jack Kessler <kessler@well.com>
Date :
Sun, 15 May 2005 15:25:47 -0700 (PDT)
Objet :
FYI France: Google Inc., libraries digital & other
FYI France:
Google Inc., libraries digital & other
People
interested in GooglePrint and Google Digital Libraries and GoogleScholar, and
the many other exciting -- and/or threatening -- new "things Google",
might be interested in the firm itself.
Who _are_
these "Google" people? What do they _look_ like? "Where"
are they? And what do _they_ say they are doing?
"Ses identités, ses qualités..."
Particularly
if you are a Google fan, or foe, residing physically far from California:
someone in Montpellier in France, say, might wonder what this new bunch online
with the strange-sounding name are like, "in person" -- someone in
Sian in China might, too.
So I went
down to Google last week, to their "first annual shareholders'
meeting", to have a look: a look at Google's first formal in-person
presentation to one of their most general publics, anyway -- for those of us
still suspicious about the online world -- who still wonder whether a mere
email address provides sufficient identification of a resource -- who worry about
that now-elderly cartoon, "On the Internet nobody knows
you're
a dog."
People in
Montpellier, and in Sian, first need to visualize a California Silicon Valley
scene: warm-to-hot weather, and dry -- and tree-lined artificially-landscaped
streets, setting off enormous car-parking lots, encircling low-rise and
sprawling office buildings -- hundreds of them...
Google's
head office is located in a vast landscape of such automobile-encircled
buildings, one stretching now for many miles across the Greater San Jose
"urbanization", a growing region steadily engulfing neighborhoods
nearby... older and now-smaller neighborhoods, such as "Oakland", and
"Berkeley", and yes "San Francisco"... and "Marin
County", and "Sacramento", and "Stockton", and
"Salinas"... Take a look at this urbanization,
sometime
-- via GoogleMaps, maybe, particularly their new satellite-photo view of it --
change can be awesome. But urban sprawl is nothing unfamiliar, in most places
now. Nor is the modern "industrial office park": they have those
around Montpellier -- perhaps Sian has them too, or it will soon.
Google,
though, is "different"...
I drove to
the predictable enormous parking lot, "checked in" to attend the
meeting, opted to walk rather than take the little busses so I could view the
corporate campus "on approach".
The Google
offices are installed in several enormous smoked - glass buildings, set amid
sculpted parks and soccer areas and volleyball courts -- all of it impressive
but, for someone already acquainted with Silicon Valley, still predictable.
Silicon
Graphics, which built the buildings Google currently occupies, looked like this
years ago, as did most other big Silicon Valley firms: no neckties -- youngish
kids wearing jeans and sneakers, playing volleyball during caffeine-breaks -- everything
so "casual" that one wondered how the work got done.
The
difference offered by Google now, however, is _inside_ the buildings. This was
the firm's "first" such event, as I mentioned, and for the occasion
they mounted a couple of dozen laptops on little tradeshow-style fixtures, each
of these manned by a youthful and enthusiastic tee-shirted
"demonstrator", who guided us not-so- youthful shareholders and
venture capitalists and others through all of their latest "exciting
stuff".
GooglePrint
and GoogleScholar were shown, f course, and were excellently presented. So too
were GoogleNews" and "Gmail" and "Picasa" and
"Keyhole", and several more among the many new
directions
the company now is taking.
I was shown
"Orkut", a "Social Networking" system similar to Friendster:
by invitation only, to preserve confidentiality, users reveal to one another
their dreams and aspirations and innermost thoughts -- part jobsearch, part
dating service, part 21st century solution for the angst of alienation -- they
say over 6 million people now use Orkut, in over 100 countries.
And I saw
"Video": Google's new appeal to _all_ the world's videomakers -- not
just Hollywood, then, as competitor Yahoo is attempting, but little people too
-- to let the firm index and organize and advertise the existence of
independent video efforts to the rest of the world. 6 million... and _all_ the world's
videomakers... "Who _are_ these people at Google, doing this indexing and
organizing?", I found myself asking, again...
Well, first
of all, one no longer asks about "nationality", in California. That
is a European habit, odd though this may sound to Europeans...
"Nations" were invented in Europe, remember, and not so long ago...
But nationality has become, somewhat like race and gender and age, one of a
number of "suspect classifications", no longer considered
"politically correct", if they are raised in a California
conversation: one no longer asks "Where are you from?",
as we did in the 1960s, or "Will the speaker be a man or a woman?",
or, certainly, "How old is she?" or "What race is he?"
Judging
just from those doing the demonstrating today, however, I would say the old
questions even have become superfluous -- entirely irrelevant, to a GoogleWorld
apparently populated by most of the human varieties possible on the planet.
Yes, the people inside those GoogleBuildings all seem to be young, and of
course
very, very, bright -- two characteristics in common – but they also appear to
be, and they sound as though they are, very international, and with the genders
and races as intermingled as one now sees, increasingly, in international
business meetings and large international airports.
So is
_this_ a Google difference? Silicon Valley always has been an open and
democratic place. Now-classic studies of the difference between the original
Silicon Valley and its early competitors, and later imitators, always have
pointed this out. [Dozens of such studies exist. The best I have read myself is
that by Annalee Saxenian, _Regional advantage :
culture and competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128_ (Cambridge, Mass. :
Harvard
University Press, 1994) ISBN 0674753399.]
But even
compared to the Silicon Valley of a dozen years ago, the variety among the
people, in the meeting, and walking around the corridors inside the place,
appears to me to have increased greatly. The engineers used to be all one type,
the secretaries another, the clean-up staff another still: but no longer – at Google,
anyway, it looks and sounds like it's all mixed together.
Back to the
projects we were shown, then: does any greater human variety on the staff reflect
itself in the work they do?
Take
GoogleMaps, one of the more impressive recent innovations. They just have added
wonderful maps of Canada and the UK, to the US maps which
have been offered in this beta project for some time. For the UK version, the Google
team has tried to adopt the "graphic feel" of the famous old "A
to Z" maps, with which
British
people and all London visitors are so familiar.
Perhaps a
resident anglophile could have suggested this. But the young
"presenter" said their Sydney Australia team in fact insisted upon
it: that and the crucial inclusion of "tubestops", names &
locations, which Londoners use often to give directions. International input
seems to have come in via that avenue, then: Australians, and Londoners, making
"local" decisions, in this international company -- or is it
trans-national?... "international"
being only "among nations", the specialists now say, while
"trans-national" transcends nationality...
Human
language access, too, seems to transcend nationality now, at Google: well over
100 "Interface languages"
are provided, from Afrikaans & Amharic to Xhosa & Zulu -- by way of
Frisian, Macedonian, Tamil, Telugu -- also something called Elmer Fudd (try it!
URL below...), and Klingon, and Pig Latin.
I attended
the meeting, I admit, from a number of motivations. First of all, crucial to
any "shareholder's meeting", was the food: and there Google outdid
any others I have seen or heard of recently -- sumptuous outdoor buffet spread,
on a beautiful sunny day, offering salads and delicious multiple entrees and
fresh
fruit
and _really_ good cookies.
A second
vital concern at "shareholders' meetings", then, is "monetization":
investors always want to know whether they are funding a charity or a money-making enterprise... And in this narrow arena this
firm of course was very reassuring: with their phenomenal recent financial
results, plus all of the little "tags" they are putting on things now
under development which will guarantee more income in the future. If you do
business with
Google you
will pay: the lunch will be delicious, but it will not be free. (The current
impression, though, is that Google aims generally at "economies of
scale" rather than at "price-gouging": at global markets rather
than small local ones, many inexpensive units to many people rather than a few
high-priced things to a wealthy few, low prices spread over a great many
customers – all good news to any long-term investor, then, and to customers.)
But the
third reason for enjoying Google's fine lunch, today, was my personal attempt
to try to figure out what the general direction of this varied group of Google
people is going to be, and what their motivation really is -- and yes, of
course, the latter is "the money", but it's not _only_ that...
* Maybe
it's convergence -- "Convergence in Media" -- the long wished-for
& worried-over dream/nightmare of so many, in libraryland and out in The
Matrix and in several other quarters. For those of us still Stuck In The
Previous Paradigm, like me, herewith a tentative roadmap: Information resources
(_all_ of them...):
OldMedia NewMedia
"printed books" => GooglePrint
"printed journals" => GoogleScholar
"video, & movies (?)" => GoogleVideo
"music" => (hints of "under
development")
"mobile" => GoogleMobile
"meetings" => GoogleGroups
"shopping" => Froogle & GoogleLocal
"personal communication" => Gmail &
GoogleBlogger &
GoogleTranslate &
GoogleGroups &
Orkut(?)
& Dodgeball(?)...
"digital social networking"...
"reference librarians" => GoogleSearch
"prints & photos" => GoogleImages &
Picasa
"maps" => GoogleMaps & Keyhole
"the news" => GoogleNews
(others?) => (many
more...)
-- but the revolutionary idea being, I think, not so much that there
is a concordance between the two columns, as that the entries in the latter column
all are being collapsed, now, by Google, into _one_... what the people at
Google, and interface design and marketing people elsewhere, all increasingly
call, "The Onebox" -- which is that single-line, clean-and-simple,
little whitespace Google homepage, where a single "commandline" rmember that?!) inquiry
-- eventually in natural-language, even -- can retrieve,
"The
Onebox Result" -- consisting of literally _any_ information on the
known-item being sought, in any digital format currently carried by _any_ "traditional"
media, anyplace on the planet... plus eventually maybe even off-planet, if you
count satellites and telescopes and Mars Rovers and Moon Colonies and other
things like that...
What Google
is aiming for, in other words -- in its CEO Eric Schmidt's words, at our
meeting -- is to, "Organize the world's [all of it] information [all of
it] so it will be universally [to everyone] accessible [via all 'devices'] and
useful..." -- one-stop resource for information, about anything, anywhere.
The vision,
for the firm, appears still to come from founders Larry Page and Sergey Brinn,
as many news arcles
now have reported, in increasing privacy-invading detail: both grad students at
Stanford, Sergey the atamining guru and
Larry the user interface wizard. Also some others, since the beginning --
Google
already has Legends-in-the-making: such as that of Sue Wojcicki, who
supposedly, "let Sergey and Larry store stuff in her garage", back
in, "the very beginnings" -- so much in Silicon Valley seems to have
begun in someone's borrowed garage! – Sue always was a fan of books and
libraries and now runs, among other things, the Google project to digitize
them...
Or the
story of Krishna Bharat, who -- again supposedly, as these are the stuff of
legends now, as I said -- on "9/11" got frustrated, as did we all,
with channel-flipping, as he tried to obtain a full picture on that disaster
from multiple news sources -- only instead of just complaining of his headache,
as the rest of us did that day, K. Bharat sat down at his screen and figured out
how to comb all news resources and present them on a single
manageable
Webpage... which he now runs... GoogleNews...
And there
is a Management Vision too, at Google, a firm already boasting 3000+ employees
and running famous job-recruiting contests, worldwide, which doubtless will
multiply that total now with many bright new minds. To develop all that, and
keep it motivated, Google offers "70/20/10": 70% of an employee's
work is
on
"Core" projects, involving webcrawling and ranking and information
search & retrieval -- 20% is on "Related"
applications
such as GoogleNews and Gmail -- but then 10 % is mandated to be simply
"Exploratory" -- which of course is where the fun, and the
competitive advantage, come in...
(I couldn't
help thinking, as I heard all this, of standards and standardization: of the
open-source software and techniques, and society, which created the synergies
which launched the earlier Silicon Valley hitech revolution... [See Saxenian, cited
above, and many others.] Google is testing and deciding, now, how many
dots
per inch and what type of scanning device and how many newssources per webpage,
and all sorts of other "standards" for the tasks they are
undertaking. I hope Google will see their way clear to adopting an "open
systems" approach, eventually: releasing source code and sharing
techniques and ideas and developing things in partnership with other firms --
all that they are doing is still only a very small slice of a very large pie,
as used to be said in Silicon Valley, and the building of a critical mass
really able to develop it all, to the mutual
benefit
of all, will be the work of many firms, not just one.)
So, does
all this reassure a worried rare books librarian, concerned that the precious objects
in her collection might be damaged by hamfisted "scanning" handling?
Or does it satisfy a librarian in France, upset that "The Scarlet
Pimpernel" might come in ranked higher, on a Google
retrieval, than Michelet or Lefebvre, Guizot or Furet? Well, no -- no such
guarantees -- no way...
But does it
inform, and does it broaden the debate, regarding the motivations involved in
various efforts? Also the role in them, or lack thereof, of traditional notions
such as "nationalism"?
Is the
world ready, yet, in a word, for the truly "trans-national"
corporation? --
[Keohane,
Robert O., and Joseph S. Nye, eds. _Transnational relations and world politics._ (Cambridge,
Mass.,
Harvard University Press, 1972).]
-- well, they've been talked about, for a very long time -- [Vernon,
Raymond. _Sovereignty at bay; the multinational spread of US enterprises._ (New
York : Basic Books, 1971) ISBN 0465080960.]
-- and they have been feared for even longer -- [Servan-Schreiber,
Jean Jacques. _Le Défi
américain_.
(Paris : Denoël, 1967).]
-- but maybe Google is in fact the new beast which has slouched
toward our Silicon Valley digital revolution Bethlehem and at last been born...
Think of all of these trans-national kids, all mixed in together, and of the
overseas workgroups which Google is sprouting, now, all interacting digitally /
seamlessly, 24/7 around-the-globe, and all innocent of traditional
"nationality" & "race stereotypes" & "gender
roles", & "authorities"... just as they are in their online
global video gaming... Perhaps Michelet & Guizot have better chances,
against the Baroness Orczy, with this new and young crew, than they would have
with any others?
* And maybe
all this runs even broader and deeper than that...
On my way
back from the Google meeting, a local US radio host was discussing "all
this new stuff". The guy has two daughters, ages 15 & 17, so he
figures he is "on the front lines", in everything regarding the new
Society or Anti-Society or whatever it is which we all are piecing together
now: he vigorously defends videogames
& flipfones & television "reality shows" --
perhaps because he truly believes in them, or perhaps just to keep the peace in
his own home, I don't really know.
He, or
maybe it was his guest, observed, "You know, things aren't really getting
better, or worse, they're just changing..."
So that is
what it is, perhaps: not really a digital information era which is better, than
that of the previous era of print, or one that is worse, but simply one that is
different – with attendant advantages and disadvantages -- also a different "trans-national"
world, than the one of "nationalism" which, like "print
culture", we inherited from our parents and grandparents, again with
attendant advantages and disadvantages.
A few
things about the new situation may be said for sure, at least: there will be
more to life in it, initially anyway, than simply the, "ses indentités,
ses qualités", of Established and Older and more tired eras -- more than
there was before, anyway.
And we will
have meetings which involve a few people, and great cookies,
and Webcasts...
I just wish
I could have met the GoogleDesigner who does the "holiday" logos: the
guy is wonderful --
http://www.google.com/holidaylogos.html
and
be sure to try,
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-elmer/
--oOo--
FYI France
(sm)(tm) e-journal ISSN 1071-5916
| FYI
France (sm)(tm) is a monthly electronic | journal published since 1992 as
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