Leyendo unos cuantos Blogs de los que soy fanatico, he encontrado un denominador comun en todos. Todos Hablan de Google talk de lo maravilloso que es, de la competencia con Skype, bla, bla, bla.
Yo, para poner un poco de otra cosa (Si quieren leer sobre google talk, bueno googlelize it !!!), reproduzco aqui un articulo del New York Times
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Relax, Bill Gates; It's Google's Turn as the Villain
By GARY RIVLIN
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 23 - For years, Silicon Valley hungered for a company mighty enough to best Microsoft. Now it has one such contender: the phenomenally successful Google.
But
instead of embracing Google as one of their own, many in Silicon Valley
are skittish about its size and power. They fret that the very
strengths that made Google a search-engine phenomenon are distancing it
from the entrepreneurial culture that produced it - and even
transforming it into a threat.
A year after the company went public, those inside Google are
learning the hard way what it means to be the top dog inside a culture
accustomed to pulling for the underdog. And they are facing a hometown
crowd that generally rebels against anything that smacks of corporate
behavior.
Nowadays, when venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and
technologists gather in Silicon Valley, they often find themselves
grousing about Google, complaining about everything from a hoarding of
top engineers to its treatment of partners and potential partners. The
word arrogant is frequently used.
The news last week that
Google plans to sell an additional 14 million shares of stock, adding
$4 billion to its current cash reserves of $3 billion, will only
provide more reasons to gripe.
"I've definitely been picking up
on the resentment," said Max Levchin, a founder of PayPal, the online
payment service now owned by eBay. "They're a big company now, doing things people didn't expect them to do."
Mr.
Levchin, who last year founded a multimedia company in San Francisco
called Slide, said Google "still has a long wick of good will to burn
off," but he added, "I'm surprised at how fast the company's reputation
is changing."
It was not that long ago that Google reigned here
as the upstart computer company that could do no wrong. Now some
working in the technology field are starting to draw comparisons
between Google and Microsoft, the company in Redmond, Wash., that
Silicon Valley loves most to hate.
Bill Gates certainly sees similarities between Google and his own
company. This spring, in an interview with Fortune, Mr. Gates,
Microsoft's chairman, said that Google was "more like us than anyone
else we have ever competed with."
Google's success has already
spurred Microsoft to develop its own Internet search engine (a project
code-named Underdog), but Google has legions of engineers banging away
on a range of projects of its own that, if successful, could dislodge
Microsoft from the pre-eminent spot it has enjoyed since the early
1980's.
Of course, Silicon Valley has had past pretenders to the
throne. Netscape, which went public 10 years ago this month, and its
Web browser, Navigator, were supposed to fell Microsoft - but it is
Netscape that is no longer in business. And while Google is riding
high, those closely following the company caution that it is hardly
invincible; an inflated stock price, a desire to compete in too many
sectors simultaneously or simple hubris might cause it to stumble, they
say. Even Microsoft, after all, has had legal troubles.
Still,
similarities between Google and Microsoft are evident to local
entrepreneurs including Steven I. Lurie, who worked at Microsoft
between 1993 and 1999 but now lives in San Francisco, and Joe Kraus, a
founder of the 1990's search firm Excite.
"There's that same
'think big' attitude about markets and opportunities," said Mr. Lurie,
who has visited the Google campus in Mountain View many times to see
friends who work there. "Maybe you can call it arrogance, but there's
that same sense that they can do anything and get into any area and
dominate."
To place Google in context, Mr. Kraus offered a brief history lesson. In the 1990's, he said, I.B.M.
was widely perceived in Silicon Valley as a "gentle giant" that was
easy to partner with while Microsoft was perceived as an
"extraordinarily fearsome, competitive company wanting to be in as many
businesses as possible and with the engineering talent capable of
implementing effectively anything."
Now, in the view of Mr.
Kraus, "Microsoft is becoming I.B.M. and Google is becoming Microsoft."
Mr. Kraus is the chief executive and a founder of JotSpot, a Silicon
Valley start-up hoping to sell blogging and other self-publishing tools
to corporations.
Just as Microsoft has been seen over the years
as an aggressive, deep-pocketed competitor for talent, Internet
start-ups in Silicon Valley complain that virtually every time they try
to recruit a well-regarded computer programmer, that person is already
contemplating an offer from Google.
"Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than
Microsoft ever did," said Reid Hoffman, the founder of two Internet
ventures, including LinkedIn, a business networking Web site popular
among Silicon Valley's digerati. "It's largely that they're hiring up
so many talented people, and the fact they're working on so many
different things. It's harder for start-ups to do interesting stuff
right now."
Google, Mr. Hoffman said, has caused "across the board a 25 to 50
percent salary inflation for engineers in Silicon Valley" - or at least
those in a position to weigh competing offers. A sought-after computer
programmer can now expect to make more than $150,000 a year.
David
C. Drummond, vice president for corporate development at Google,
acknowledged that the company was "very competitive" in its pursuit of
talent, but added: "We're very sensitive to how everybody is perceiving
us. We think the Silicon Valley ecosystem is critical for Google's
success."
Google is also making it more difficult for some
start-ups to raise funds. In the second half of the 1990's,
entrepreneurs frequently complained that the specter of Microsoft hung
over their every conversation with venture capitalists. Today, they say
the same about Google.
"When I meet with venture capitalists, or
if I'm engaged in a conversation about going into partnership with
someone, inevitably the question is, 'Why couldn't Google do what
you're doing?' " said Craig Donato, the founder and chief executive of
Oodle, a site for searching online classified listings more quickly.
"The answer is, 'They could, and they're probably thinking about it,
but they can't do everything and do it well,' " Mr. Donato said. "Or at
least I'm hoping they can't."
Google has already added free
e-mail, mapping, news aggregation and digital-photo management to its
offerings, bringing it into competition in each case with two or more
rivals. On Wednesday, it will announce plans for an instant-messaging
system. And its plans for a new stock issue are fueling speculation
that it is preparing to enter any number of other markets, from
services for mobile phone users to an online payment service that would
compete with PayPal.
Add to that list an Internet-based phone
system and several products that would be directly aimed at Microsoft,
including a Google browser and a software offering that would compete
with Microsoft Office.
"If there's a perception that we're
exploring lots of different areas, some of which might not be directly
related to our core area of search, that's true," said Mr. Drummond,
the Google vice president. "It's part of our DNA to be always
innovating and exploring lots of different areas."
Yet so driven
has Google been in its pursuit of new markets that at least a few in
Silicon Valley are using an epithet to taunt Google that people here
once reserved for Microsoft: "The Borg," a reference to an army of
creatures in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" that took over
civilization after civilization with machinelike precision.
Perhaps
an anti-Google reaction was to be expected, given the glowing press the
company has enjoyed for several years. Or maybe the carping and
complaining is the inevitable reaction to a company so successful that
it cannot help stomping on toes, even if accidentally.
"Hubris is
an issue at every one of these Silicon Valley companies that are
successful," said Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal who has invested in
roughly 15 Internet start-ups in recent years. "I don't know if it's
any worse at Google than it's been at other highly successful
technology companies."
Aggressiveness is another signal trait
among successful companies like Google - something those in parts of
the media world are starting to learn.
Google recently announced that it would not talk to any reporter from CNETNews.com,
a technology news Web site, until July 2006, after a reporter for the
site wrote an article raising privacy questions about the information
Google collects about individuals.
The company also provoked the
ire of many within the blogging world - not to mention snarky comments
in Silicon Valley from those thinking Google was behaving like an
old-line company that doesn't get it - when earlier this year it fired
a new employee who had joked online that the free meals, the on-site
gym and all the other perks were a clever ploy to keep people at their
desks longer.
"Google is at that inflection point where it's
starting to act like an establishment company, and Silicon Valley is a
rebel culture," said Gautam Godhwani, a founder and chief executive at
Simply Hired, an online employment site.
Microsoft, of course,
has its hold on the Windows world - and a market capitalization almost
four times Google's. By contrast, switching to a new search engine is
as easy as calling up another Web page - if a new company is able to do
to Google what Google did to some of the earliest leaders of search,
including AltaVista and Excite.
For the moment, at least,
Google is aiming for that most coveted position in technology: a
platform that, like Microsoft's operating system, is so popular that
outside software developers write programs, and Web developers build
new Google-related services, that render the Google home page
indispensable to the personal computer ecosystem.
"In the day,
you'd hear that Microsoft was the evil empire, especially in Silicon
Valley," said Brian Lent, the president of Medio Systems, a start-up in
Seattle working on mobile-phone-based search. "Google is the new evil
empire, because they're in such a powerful position in terms of
control. They have potential monopolistic control over access to
information."
Mr. Lent, who worked closely with Google's
founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, when all three were Ph.D.
students at Stanford University, helped introduce Mr. Brin and Mr. Page
to one of the company's earliest investors.
"I like and respect
the Google guys," Mr. Lent said, "but let's just say that their
ultimate aim seems to me to be, 'One Google under Google, for which it
stands.' "
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La puta que largo es !!! manana pongo un resumen. Ahora si tuvistes paciencia para leerlo, cuentame que opinas?
Ciao,
Dio
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