Thankfully it’s John Dvorak playing connect the dots with the Internet’s past and Google’s present and future, because the points are hard to argue. When Bill Gates recently said Google was most like Microsoft, more than any other competitor, he may have been making a more subtle statement than most people realized.
Has Google become its own nemesis? Is imitation the sincerest form of profitability? Copy and paste your thoughts on WebProWorld.
Dvorak may have indirectly uncovered more of a meaning behind the message.
In Dvorak’s article, he goes down a laundry list of Google ideas that started somewhere else. The search engine server farm concept started with AltaVista. Contextual search ads began with GoTo.com. Gmail is Hotmail with more storage.
Microsoft has always been the company seen as derivative. Watch an up and comer make headway into a market, and one could bet next week’s copy of InfoWorld there would be a product development announcement from Microsoft along the same lines.
And Microsoft has taken plenty of grief for it. Dvorak thinks Google doesn’t because of a warmer, fuzzier public image. But the famed “don’t do evil” phrase has long been excised from Google’s SEC filings, and the company did give Cnet News two months worth of publicity by famously banning its staff from talking to Cnet reporters in the wake of the Eric Schmidt info-from-Google story.
(Memo to Google – I know you’re reading this. Eric Schmidt still has a Yahoo.com email address on his web site. I found that on Google. If he needs a Gmail invite please let me know, I’ve got lots of them.)
Competition, and copying, has been good for Internet users. Gmail’s rolling storage increase has led Microsoft and Yahoo to dump their miserly email space offerings and give users an increase. The Google Talk chat client was followed by MSN and Yahoo agreeing to make their chat clients interoperate. Just by being Google, Google does good things.
Not always original things, but mostly good things. Users will always welcome improvements that truly improve their online experience, and that more than anything has led Google to the top of the search world.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
