In the Larry Page era, wither the splashy Google product launch?
Remember the days when Google had big splashy product launches?
It almost seems like a bygone era, with the Web search giant now appearing to favor a more muted approach to product unveilings.
The change in style may reflect the change at the top, with Larry Page, Google’s famously laconic co-founder, taking the CEO reins in April.
Consider Friday’s unveiling of the revamped Google TV service. All the key media outlets were pre-briefed on the news ahead of time, resulting in the usual blanket of press coverage. But there was none of the fanfare that accompanied the rollout of the first version of Google TV, during which CEOs from partners such as Intel, Sony and other companies took the stage at Google’s developer conference last year.
Of course, Google TV did not exactly set the world on fire, so it’s not entirely surprising that Google is taking a more low-key approach and trying to keep the hype in check this time around.
Similarly, Google opted not to have a launch event for Google+, perhaps one of the company’s most significant new product offerings this year, when it announced the product this summer.
That was in stark contrast to the company’s previous foray into social networking. The much-maligned Google Buzz was introduced at a big event at Google’s headquarters in 2010 attended by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and other Google executives, but never managed to gain traction with consumers.
Google pulls the plug on more products – the Larry Page clean-up continues
It’s no secret that the new, Larry Page-led Google is pruning its sprawling collection of products.
Page said so himself on the company’s quarterly earnings conference call, and the recent closures of Slide (a social networking firm Google acquired for $179 million a year ago), Google Labs and Google Health, have made it clear that Page is a man of his word.
Ten more Google products were put on the chopping block on Friday — or as Google put it more delicately in a post on its official blog, the products were swept up in a “spring-clean.”
“Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features,” said Google Senior Vice President Alan Eustace in the blog post.
Among the latest casualties: Aardvark, a pioneering social question-and-answer service that had earned praise from tech pundits before Google acquired it in 2010; Fast Flip, a two-year-old tool that allows readers to quickly “flip” through pages of digital newspapers and magazines, and Sidewiki a tool that lets people leave comments about specific Web pages as they browse.
Eustace noted that all the Google employees working on these projects will be moved over to “higher-impact products.”
“We’ve never been afraid to try big, bold things, and that won’t change,” he said. “We’ll continue to take risks on interesting new technologies with a lot of potential. But by targeting our resources more effectively, we can focus on building world-changing products with a truly beautiful user experience.”
Tech wrap: Breaking down Zynga’s possible IPO delay
One of tech’s most anticipated public offerings of the year could be delayed, according to a report in the New York Post on Monday. Online gaming company Zynga may hold off on its IPO until November said The Post, citing a “source close to the company.”
The delay is partly related to questions the SEC has about how Zynga measures its daily and monthly users, as well as its bookings, CNBC reported. “Zynga’s accounting measures are less worrisome to the SEC than Groupon’s, says one person familiar with the matter, but the agency is nonetheless working to make Zynga’s prospectus as accessible to investors as possible,” writes CNBC’s Kate Kelly.
Renowned venture capitalist Alan Patricof, managing director of Greycroft Partners LLC, told Bloomberg TV he thinks Zynga is merely waiting for a “hole in the market,” which he described as a one or two-week period where the markets are up and the underwriting bank “calls up and says we’re going tomorrow.”
Fortune.com’s Dan Primack calls Zynga’s IPO delay a “non-story.” “Is it really news that market volatility might push things back a few weeks? … This is not a story about Zynga losing anything, let along its ‘zing.’ Need proof. Just try substituting any other IPO candidate where the NY Post writes Zynga.”
News of Zynga’s potential delay comes just 36 hours after Bloomberg reported the company restructured its shareholder agreement to give founder Mark Pincus unparalleled voting power. The board approved three tiers of stock, giving each one of Pincus’s shares 70 votes, up from 10, according to a document obtained by Bloomberg. The move gives Pincus more power than LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman or Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Zynga has asked current shareholders to agree to the new stock structure by Sept. 2.
Stop the Scanners: Google halts efforts to digitize old newspapers
Google’s has long touted a grand vision of organizing the world’s information. But on Friday, the world’s No.1 Internet search engine acknowledged that not all of that information will make the cut.
The company has put the brakes on a three-year-old project to scan and digitize newspaper archives dating back to the 18th century.
Google said that websurfers can continue to access its existing free online archive of newspapers – the company has digitized more than 3.5 million issues of more than 2,000 newspaper titles worldwide – but the company will no longer add to the collection by scanning old newspapers.
“We don’t plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the Google News Archives, and we are no longer accepting new microfilm or digital files for processing,” Google said in an emailed statement.
The news comes as Google undergoes its biggest management shift in a decade, with co-founder Larry Page replacing Eric Schmidt as CEO in April.
Interestingly, Page is considered to be a big proponent of ambitious “moonshot” projects, such as Google’s similar effort to scan the world’s out-of-print library books (an effort which is currently facing some legal difficulties).
But Google insiders have also said they expect Page to prune the vast number of projects underway at the company, so that Google can focus on the ones with the most promise. And there is increasing pressure from investors over Google’s free-spending ways.
Live Coverage: Will Page lead Google’s call?
Wall Street formally meets the new Larry Page-led Google on Thursday afternoon when the world’s No.1 Internet search company reports first-quarter financial results.
The 38-year-old Page has a lot on his plate now that he’s CEO of the company he co-founded thirteen years ago. Will he crack open Google’s $35 billion cash coffers to take on Facebook or to pay off shareholders? Will there be more self-driving cars funded at the Googleplex? Will Page even be on the analyst conference call? Check in Thursday at 1:30pm Pacific Time for a live blog of the highly-anticipated call.
Tech wrap: Wozniak open to active role at Apple
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told Reuters he would consider returning to take an active role at the consumer electronics giant. Wozniak, a lifelong hands-on engineer, said he liked technology to be relatively open so that he could add his own touches. “My thinking is that Apple could be more open and not lose sales,” said Wozniak, but added: “I’m sure they’re making the right decisions for the right reasons for Apple.”
The Justice Department approved Google’s purchase of ticketing software company ITA Software as long as Google licensed the software to rivals, continued to upgrade it and created firewalls to hide ITA clients’ proprietary information. Google said it would soon bring out a new travel search tool.
Google CEO Larry Page moved to streamline decision-making at the company’s key social network, mobile, Internet software and YouTube product groups. Social networking chief Vic Gundotra, Android head Andy Rubin, Chrome senior vice president Sundar Pichai and YouTube head honcho Salar Kamangar were given a direct reporting line to Page and greater autonomy, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The Federal Security Service, Russia’s domestic spy agency, called for access to encrypted communication providers like Gmail, Hotmail and Skype, saying the uncontrolled use of such services could threaten national security. The proposal provoked a wave of negative comments in the Russian language online, with many saying the country could follow China’s attempts to limit the Internet.
Startup Fusion-io, backed by Steve Wozniak and Michael Dell, said it can outwit computer-storage incumbents like EMC by putting a solid-state flash memory drive directly into the computer server rather than in the traditional storage area, which is further away and takes longer to reach, effectively speeding up data processing by a factor of 10.
There’s an app for:
- Wealth management on tablets: Orion Advisor Services’ MobileAdvisor app displays portfolios, performance information and contact information and allows advisers using Orion’s platform to rebrand the app, so clients download it, log in, track their portfolios, and view videos that the adviser provides. LogMeIn connects Apple iPad users to their office desktop computers, giving wealth managers information wherever their clients need it.
Wild news on Apple, Google changes? Not if you’re an analyst
It has certainly been an interesting week in Silicon Valley as two of the most closely watched companies in the world shuffled their executive suites. On Monday, Apple announced that its chief executive and charismatic leader Steve Jobs was taking a temporary medical leave – his third since 2004 — a day before Apple released its quarterly results. On Thursday, Google reported a stellar Q4 and dropped that Larry Page would be stepping into the role of chief executive, as Eric Schmidt takes up the executive chairman position.
Big news, right? So it’s surprising then that analysts who have the opportunity to quiz management during earnings calls failed to mention anything about the changes. Not one analyst asked about the C-suite during the Google and Apple calls. Google even made its three top executives, Schmidt, Page and Sergey Brin available for short period on Thursday’s call. The three analysts in the queue pitched questions about the following subjects: Google’s real estate purchase in New York, government outreach and social networking plans.
from The Great Debate:
Google’s greatest skill – and challenge
By Jeff Jarvis Jarvis is the author of "What Would Google Do?" and teaches at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His next book, "Public Parts", will be published later this year.
The miracle of Google was that it could accomplish anything—let alone become the fastest growing company in the history of the world and the greatest disruptive force in business and society today—while being run by a committee, a junta, a council of the gods.
In management, as in every other arena of business, technology, and media, Google broke every rule and made new ones.
It should not be a shock that Eric Schmidt has stepped aside as CEO and made room for Larry Page. Schmidt was the prince regent who ruled until the boy king could take the throne while training him to do so. We knew that this would happen. We just forgot that it would.
When I interviewed Schmidt a few weeks ago and asked about pressure over privacy, China, and lobbying, he said, “This is not the No. 1 crisis at Google.” What is? “Growth,” he said, “just growth.”
Scale is Google’s greatest skill and greatest challenge. It scaled search (vs. quaint Yahoo, which thought it could catalogue this web thing). It scaled advertising (vs. the media companies that today don’t know how to grow, only shrink). It is scaling mobile (by giving away Android). It has tried to scale innovation (with its 20 percent rule)—but that’s the toughest.
‘pressure over privacy’
Although it may seem just a small blip on the horizon at present, the storm breaking around UK Prime Minister David Cameron will have huge ramifications for Google, social networks and media practices….
Sun Valley – Google’s Larry Page: Stop stressing about search data privacy
Hey you Mr. Privacy Nut,
Google co-founder Larry Page has a message for you: Stop worrying about how data about your Web searching habits might be abused. Your search data is there to serve a greater good.
“It’s always easy to be fearful of a hypothetical bad thing that could happen in the future, and yet the data of these kinds of (search) logs and so on are actually very, very useful,” Page told reporters at a briefing in Sun Valley on Thursday.
He cited the company’s recent work using search data to figure out which regions in the US were experiencing flu outbreaks. Google was able to detect the flu more accurately than the government, Page said, and probably could save it tens of millions of dollars in the process.
Page said the company is also exploring whether search data could detect pandemics.
“I think the answer is probably yes, we will be able to do some things like that. That could possibly save a third of the world population,” he said.
“So you could sort of worry about well, there’s some possibility something bad will happen with search logs – I’m not sure what – nothing has really happened yet of significance. Or we’re moving very fast. There’s lots of new uses for the data. Once it’s deleted it’s gone. You can’t ever get it back.”
Sun Valley: Jane Goodall and the primary primates
It’s day three of the Sun Valley media conference and the event has started to feel like a Jane Goodall documentary, in which we’re Jane and the moguls are the apes who have become comfortable letting us observe and record their movements. Several media executives groggily making their way to the morning’s first session (scheduled to kick off at 7:30), stopped to chat with the throng of press waiting to greet them.
Liberty Media Chairman John Malone voiced concerns about the economy for nearly 10 minutes while NBC’s Jeff Zucker, who once warned of the risks to media companies of trading analog dollars for digital pennies and later upped the exchange rate to dimes, posited the idea that the media industry was now within reach of collecting digital quarters. It’s change we can believe in.
Later on Thursday, Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt (who for reasons unknown has been toting a camera with a beefy zoom lens throughout the event, even after-hours at the bar on Wednesday evening) will hold his traditional Sun Valley press roundtable, possibly with co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who are here.
As for Steve Jobs, it appears that he is a no-show.
And while hoops superstar Lebron James mingled with the executives at Sun Valley last year, he will probably end up overshadowing the gathering of media bigwigs from afar this year when he announces his choice of a new home team on Thursday night.
(John Malone does his media thing at Sun Valley. Photo: Reuters)
