By the way, if you're interested in search, Google, or SEO, it's a pretty good book: http://www.amazon.com/Im-Feeling-Lucky-Confessions-Employee/... There's several anecdotes about the early days of Google that help explain why parts of Google turned out the way they did.
i'm reading it currently (page 220 at the moment) i must say it's the best book about google yet.
it's actually the book about google i was waiting for. it's a book from an (ex) googler (no, i won't call them xoogerls) about google. it tells the story about the chaotic start up days, about their victories and their failures (and yes, there were failures), about the time when marketing had to "volunteer" to rewire servers, how brand and engineers fought about UX only to be overruled by sergy, how frustrating it can be to work with genius developers.
it is way better than "in the plex" (which is just "myth making" with little substance), much much better than all the "what would google do" like books, and much better than all SEO books (which are all sh#t anyway ... exception "search engine marketing incorporated")
well i'm on page 220 and there was not much about SEO yet. matt cutts and his p#rn cookies were mentioned, his fight against spam. there is a short story about "search for non PhD" which explains search engines pretty well (and holds more valuable information than you can get from an average SEO).
it also settles the question once and for all "does google uses the data from the google toolbar?" (the answer is: YES, and the green page rank bar (i call it "thought cancer bar") is indeed just a
bait to turn on the "advanced features"). nothing new, but this time it's official (kind of). i hope that all the SEOs which claim that "it's not important what the users do after the SERP clickthrough" will finally be silenced.
Hardcopy is 40c more than ebook? $9.99 for ebook, $10.39 for physical.
Digital pricing for books is really starting to get to me. It makes absolutely no sense why a digital version can cost nearly as much (and sometimes more) than a physical copy.
I found "in the plex" fascinating too, at least the first part. It gets a bit long when it goes into details of the Chinese debacle, the Obama campaign, etc. Stuff that isn't much "googley" :)
Almost the complete opposite of a company I worked at in the late 90s where the CEO would say things like "If rover will eat I will feed him" (meaning if the customer buys the schlock we're selling who cares what you think) and "Quality Assurance is an impediment to revenue".
This is one of the reasons why I don't buy the whole concept of "intellectual property": the only thing that should matter is the quality and value provided to consumers; not marketing, not ideas, not strategy, but the end result, which as many have pointed out before is mostly execution, but whatever the path one gets there, only product standing on its own merits should matter.
So only big companies like google should ever be able to do anything?
When a little guy with no resources comes up with a brilliant idea he would try to implement it, the big guys would see it and use their near infinite resources to copy it while adding features and you would be cheering for them?
We need to fix intellectual property, not scrap it.
When a little guy with no resources comes up with a brilliant idea he would try to implement it, the big guys would see it and use their near infinite resources to copy it while adding features and you would be cheering for them?
Out of curiosity when has this happened in the startup world? I don't ever hear about anybody registering patents or fending off the big guys.
Also easily copy-able ideas can't really be that brilliant, can they? If Google can steal your idea and your customer base easily then that frees you up to work on something more difficult/important.
It sounds like you are supporting expanded software patents. That is a huge can of worms, and I am pretty sure it would result in the "big guy" having way more ability to keep the "little guy" down since their expansive software patent portfolios would make it so pretty much any new software would at least arguably infringe something. And just winning the case in the long term wouldn't be good enough if they are able to get an injunction and tie up the courts that would be pretty much the death sentence to any "little guy".
>It sounds like you are supporting expanded software patents.
No, I'm not for "expanding", I'm for fixing. The idea of patents was to give the little guy a chance to compete with the bigger players. It has been corrupted into being the exact opposite. I would like a solution to be found that accomplishes the original goal. And no, I don't know how to do it but I'm not convinced that it's impossible.
>if they are able to get an injunction and tie up the courts that would be pretty much the death sentence to any "little guy".
This strikes me as largely a US problem, not a fundamental one.
Other countries don't have injunctions? Even if the time to court isn't too long, it'll still be on the order of months which is enough to destroy most small companies.
I think the court costs should really be a footnote in this line of discussion though; I think the amount of R&D that big companies do combined with the nature of software patents would make it impossible for any start up to avoid actually infringing on multiple patents.
So you could have some great idea for a startup that does something innovative in the social arena; that's not going to help you very much if some big company has patents on things like friend lists or settable profile photos are patented. I'm honestly don't even think that is a "big vs little" company issue; what if Google had patented search engine results weighted by links? What if Twitter had patented broadcast status updates when it was a start up?
If the idea was "nonobvious" it should take some time for the big guy to figure out how to implement it (and it might even end up being cheaper to buy out the small guy).
Plus, the implementation should be covered by IP (but not the idea itself).
If a small guy invented the "one click buying" button, should it be protected?
Plus, in the end, we all win (if big company popularizes small guy's idea and it makes something better).
What I wanted to say is that protecting the idea is a very bad thing (and we've seen it).
I do agree with protecting the implementation (which is what most countries do).
I'm not sure on how to give the "small guy" a head start without giving him some protection on the idea, but I have a strong opinion that protecting the idea is bad. (I could be wrong, and I'm open to being convinced).
Yes, I'm against protecting abstract ideas with no implementation.
Even when there is an implementation, it's not obvious to me that it should be especially protected by a government (especially a fallible government, which is all of them, as well-meaning as they might be).
I'm definitely not in favor of granting you protection on a "new form of scheduling". A program or calendar or whatever that implements it, sure.
"Patent No. 5,715,314, for example, gives the holder a monopoly over "network-based sales systems" - we call that e-commerce." (yes, Amazon among others is a licensee)
Another well-known case is of course Coca-Cola, which protects its core formula via trade secret rather than relying on the government.
(I am in favor of copyright, and protecting implementations as well - a reduced form of patents).
As I mentioned, if it's not obvious, and the big guy requires resources to copy it, they might be better off purchasing the small guy. If it was easy to copy, well, let's hope the small guy's execution was better than big guy's. (I do realize that big guy has an advantage in marketing, etc.)
> Yes, I'm against protecting abstract ideas with no implementation.
It's curious that you seen to think that patents can protect something other than ideas because ideas are the only things that patents protect.
> Even when there is an implementation, it's not obvious to me that it should be especially protected by a government (especially a fallible government, which is all of them, as well-meaning as they might be).
Then whom will enforce them? Do I hire a private army?
I assume that you feel the same about contracts and copyright (wrt enforcement).
> I'm definitely not in favor of granting you protection on a "new form of scheduling". A program or calendar or whatever that implements it, sure.
So, once someone sees my new form of scheduling, they can use it and there's nothing that I can do about it. (I wasn't thinking calendar scheduling, but it doesn't matter.)
In that world, I'm going to reveal as little as possible.
> If it was easy to copy
Small orgs innovate only when they benefit from doing so. Since the innovations come from small orgs, reducing their ability to benefit is a huge cost. I'm still waiting to see the benefit.
Note that there are bogus patents in chemistry and every other field, yet I don't see near the outrage. Is software special?
No, they don't protect ideas, they protect products or processes. According to WIPO:
"What is a Patent?
A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention, which is a product or a process that provides, in general, a new way of doing something, or offers a new technical solution to a problem. In order to be patentable, the invention must fulfill certain conditions "
On your second point, I am in favor of government enforcement of contracts (as a last resort, hopefully), and copyright as well (though it should be amended or limited).
On your scheduling idea, yes, if the implementation is easy, then your only recourse is obscurity (trade secrets).
Scientific theory or discovery and mathematical methods are NOT patentable.
At Business School you learn that all sources of competitive advantage are temporary. BigCo will catch up with you eventually if you don't use your temporary advantage to build up.
> A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention, which is a product or a process that provides, in general, a new way of doing something, or offers a new technical solution to a problem. In order to be patentable, the invention must fulfill certain conditions "
You're reading "product" and "process" too literally. A patent on a new way of making a wheel is not just a patent on the wheels that you're making. It's on the way you make wheels, the idea, whether or not you're involved in said wheel making.
> Scientific theory or discovery and mathematical methods are NOT patentable.
Scheduling isn't any of the above, even if it happens to use some of them.
Consider the patent on making vulcanized rubber. It came out of scientific discovery and depends on chemical "laws", but isn't any of those things. It doesn't cover the use of those things to do other things. It just covers the use of those things to vulcanize rubber.
> At Business School you learn that all sources of competitive advantage are temporary.
Patronize much? Anything that applies to "all" isn't specifically relevant to this discussion, which is about specific sources of competitive advantage.
I'll repeat my question - do you really want to leave innovation to BigCos?
>it should take some time for the big guy to figure out how to implement it
Not when big company has as many people as big company wants to work on the problem.
>If a small guy invented the "one click buying" button, should it be protected?
No, of course not. IP does need to be fixed, I said that.
>Plus, in the end, we all win (if big company popularizes small guy's idea and it makes something better).
No we don't. Most of us may get a slightly better version of something we want, but we would have anyway. And we will have stricken a blow to ones ability to become better off than we started out.
Personally I'm for a world where as many people as possible can become financially independent. I utterly despise anything that means that "wage slaves" have to remain such and big companies get even more powerful. $1 million would change the lives of many people on this site but google/apple/MS wouldn't even notice such a relatively small amount.
They can change course faster but once the course is known you can get a long way by simply throwing more people at it. Big corps can do this, one man shows cannot.
I don't know about Google, but my experience working in big corporations gave me the impression that they're extremely slow-moving and tactical.
They may have more people to throw at things, but they will almost always prefer tactical over strategical, as all of the managerial chain is judged by quarterly profits.
Note how so much of large corporations' innovation is really just the purchase of small start-ups which can think strategically and focus on the right things.
Windows PCs from about 1994 to now have been an example of "only execution matters". The whole industry is commoditized, and the only way to compete is on price. This has produced really low quality, lowest common denominator junk.
Since Apple's software was not compatible with the windows market, Apple had to build a culture of innovation. This innovation has served them well.
Google seeks to rip off apple's innovation with android (the multi-touch UI, etc.) and sun's innovation by copying java and "giving it away". A lot of people think this is "open" because it is "Free" and because google is open sourcing the code-- why not, they stole the technology in the first place. It doesn't matter that they clean-room duplicated it, they didn't have to incur the cost of discovering it.
The result is, predictably, a race to the bottom in quality and price for android handsets.
If you want to get rid of patents, ammend the constitution. What I don't hear much from anti-IP people is what they want to replace it with. Have you considered what things will look like when all this technology-- rather than being published openly for everyone to learn from and to use as a starting point for coming up with new things-- becomes a secret that is closely guarded?
It seems the anti-IP people want to be able to use other's innovations (Eg: Apple, Sun) but without having to pay the royalties for it that the patent system imposes--- and without also using these patents as a starting point to come up with something new.
If android had come up with something genuinely original, then the anti-IP perspective would be undermined by android starting with Apple's IP (Before coming up with something new.)
But since google just copied Apple, it sound to me like wanting something for nothing.
