Google Employment

I had a few minutes today to read Life at Google - The Microsoftie Perspective Life at Google - The Microsoftie Perspective. It was quite an interesting read that makes me really wonder about how Google really operates and where Google may be going.

There are a few things that sound great. Free clothes that you can just pick up a couple times a week. How nice would it be to know that instead of doing laundry on Tuesday you could count on just picking up a new shirt when you got to work? Also 3 free all you can eat meals are provided every day. This sounds wonderful because of the time and money it would save me in buying and preparing food. The even go as far as to provide on-site health care. Based on this I am thinking where can I sign up. Throw me a job and I can start five minutes ago.

Unfortunately with every great benefit there is a cost. The typical employee is on e-mail 24 hours a day, and seven days a week, and spend most of there evenings working from home. As a father this would kill me. I have to have the time that I can dedicate to my child or I am lost. Beyond that I have to give myself time to recharge to continue to produce the best results I can while I am working.

Another problem I see is that there is no plan for career development. You can earn more money and get a better title but that is all that changes. At some point there needs to be an option to move up into new responsibilities and challenges or employees will become complacent and after time innovation will grind to a halt because everyone will be set into doing what they do and not trying to learn and expand into new abilities.

Overall as I see it now Google is a great place to start a career. Out of college get a start there, but once you have all you can get on your resume it is time to move on. Move into something that will allow you to continue to grow as a person both in your career and out of it. True happiness comes from a full and balanced life, not from a life dedicated to only one task.

More on Evil Google.

So yesterday I asked when Google will turn evil. Today am getting an answer. It has already started. Google is now asking you, me and everyone to report when they think someone is using paid links. Meaning for instance I offer you $20 to put my link on your site. Google is also asking that all paid links be indicated as such to Google so they know not to count them

I understand rules against using hidden links and trying to deceive the search engines. Those are generally related to spam sites. What I see happening is Google does not want anyone taking a piece of their pie. Google make a large amount of money by selling links, but they don’t want you to.

Google says this will make the internet better. They don’t want pages to be ranked high that do not earn their incoming links. This is an understandable statement, but also brings questions to my mind. Why not focus attention on eliminating the spam websites by having someone actually look at them. I feel like we have built a strong website, but on many keywords there are sights that promote spam and piracy that come up higher in the search results. I also often see these sites promoting spam and piracy in the Google paid links.

Google’s path to evil and to self destruction has started. The real question is who is going to step up in the next few years to take Google’s place as the number one search engine.

When will Google turn Evil?

So much for don’t be evil. There has to be some amount of evil in the Google Empire. Google continues to acquire more and more pieces of the internet advertising world. Google could at a whim put out hundreds of small businesses who work to have potential customers find them online. I have heard stories of domains being banned from Google, with no way to have the ban lifted. Imagine if you bought a domain and found that you could not be shown in Google search results.

As Google grows and picks fights with Microsoft and other major IT companies it is going to become evil. Microsoft never set out to have a reputation as being evil. I do not personally believe that Microsoft is evil. Microsoft is a company that worked very hard and did very smart things to get to the top. Now they have to defend themselves from attacks.

I see Google picking fights with Microsoft. Microsoft has not done some very “evil” things that they could do. Would it really be hard for Microsoft to block some Google tools in Internet Explorer because of potential security risks? Of course it would not be hard. Microsoft is playing by the rules. Soon Google may see that they can not beat Microsoft by playing by the rules. That is when we will find out just how evil Google really is.

"Microsoft is Dead". Really?

It is funny to see people pronouncing the death of Microsoft. The only areas where Microsoft does not dominate are areas that they have started to aggressively pursue. Microsoft dominates the desktop. No other OS product competes with it. Microsoft Office owns productivity. Sure there “open source” options thrown around left and right, but in most homes and most businesses Microsoft Office rules.

Google dominates the internet. There is no question in this, but even Google’s domination of the internet is not as strong as Microsoft’s domination of the desktop. In the last few months Microsoft has started to push their way into the web. Getting live search as the default page on new Lenovo systems will be big, but it will take time.

Microsoft has never been aggressive in the web, but Google attempted to compete with Office and it appears that Microsoft is going to fight back on Google’s turf.

Lenovo to go Live

Lenovo has come to an agreement with Microsoft. This will put Windows Live services in Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks and ThinkCentre desktops. This deal should help Microsoft’s presence in the search engine market.

Google currently holds most of the search market followed by Yahoo and Microsoft sitting in 3rd place. Having the Live Search default for Lenovo will likely increase the traffic for Microsoft.

This comes after Google released Google Apps to compete with Microsoft Office software. Microsoft currently controls the majority of the software market and improving their search level could quickly do a large amount of damage to Google.

Office 2007 vs. Google Apps

I have seen a lot of information lately about Google Apps. From what I have been able to determine Google is offering a web based Word Processor and Spreadsheet application.  It is being said that this will compete with Microsoft Office 2007. Specifically with the Word and Excel portions of Microsoft Office. The more I look over the information on Google Apps the less appeal I see.

Google Apps is a web based system. There is an advantage in this from a licensing standpoint. There is not a need to keep track of license information, only a username and password. Also there is no installation or activation needed. The issue is you have to be connected to the internet at all times in order to use your application. If your internet service goes down or slows down, your applications go down or slow down.

The price of Google Apps has also been talked about. At $50 per user per year it sounds like a very cost effective method. A counter to that is Office Standard runs about $360 for the full retail license, even less under Open Lcense. The difference being once you buy Office, it is yours. You can use it for 10 at $36 a year, or longer and the price per year continues to go down. It doesn’t take long for $50 per year to seem like a lot more to pay then you would for Office. There are benefits to both, please post your opinions!