Excellent interview with Joe Kraus on Google’s social web projects - read - listen
In particular, check out what Kraus has to say about Google’s “do no evil” philosophy as sound business strategy:
I understand the notion that a company of Google’s size often gets perceived as having a grand master plan of the way the world is going to work over the next ten years. I can understand how people might project something diabolical.
The truth is far more simple than that. The trust is that Google’s fate is directly tied to how good the web is. As the web goes, so goes Google. If you look at something like Google Gears, which tried to solve the problem of one deficiency of the web, which is it didn’t work offline. And the reason that Google did Google Gears is not because it was some grand plan to make more money as a result of Google Gears, but as a result of the fact that by making the web better and by making it a place where people spend more time, where people store more information, that ultimately that benefits Google indirectly.
The more time people spend online, the more likely they are to do more searching, and the more money that Google makes. So, it is very indirect, but it is also betting on the web as a platform of the next decade.
OpenSocial is like that as well. OpenSocial doesn’t have any monetization component. If you’re an OpenSocial container like MySpace, you don’t have to use AdSense. You can use whatever advertising system you want. You don’t have to have advertising. So, this is really about making the web better - making it a great platform for developers and users - and ultimately, because Google is a big part of people’s web experience, the belief that to better the web means the more time, the more (even if you just boil it down) the more searches people do… That’s ultimately what the benefit is.
We just held Google I/O, which was our annual developer conference. And the whole theme, in all the things we’re doing, we’re really about, “How do we make the web a better place for users and developers?” So, for developers - be it App Engine as a way to allow developers to have an easy development and deployment environment for applications, so you don’t have to build so much from scratch. Or Gears, in terms of making an application both work offline and having a local data store, so you can do more for end users. Or OpenSocial or all the APIs that’s Google’s providing. It’s really about, “How do you make the web a better experience?” And ultimately, we think Google benefits from that.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1982
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/audio/KW_Google_Kraus.mp3
