After IBM gave up being the platform vendor, that's basically what they did -- they became a consultancy and investment banker. Microsoft will eventually move there as their investors get fed up with quarter after quarter of flat growth. Google will get there as well, but first they have to get this tidal wave of fear out of their system ...
(I've commented over there.)
1 comment:
I get so sick and tired of war metaphors.
Your comment about the problem of knowing when your moment in the cycle is over is a great point.
I'm not a savvy user of Facebook or Google, but certainly a user. It seems easy to say what Google's core products are just by listing the ones I use. But looking at my Social Circle makes me pause in that assumption.
Have you looked at yours? The part that seems immediately interesting is the secondary connections, which they point out you can change only by adding or deleting direct connections.
What's obvious is their list of direct connections to me is awfully incomplete. A reason for this is I've persisted in using an email client for my address books-most recently Thunderbird.
My social graph is valuable to me. Google making the social circle they've created for me visible to me adds value.
Facebook gives users ways to control their social graph. Similar control of Google's Social Circle is convoluted. There clearly are issues of strategy taxes for Google in users taking some control over their graph. But it seems there are lots of ways to add value to users and Google too.
It's not at all clear to me Facebook has "won".
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