Dude I don't care what you think, but Google is the greatest technology organization ever existed. The "How It Feels" video literally made me in tears because the vision is so great, so compelling. The way we interact will change fundamentally, but that isn't a bad thing. People are always terrified by progress because progress means difference, and people feel comfort in falling back to the same thing. But, again, I don't care. The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed. We will all be living in an age of augmented reality.
> but Google is the greatest technology organization ever existed.
Bullshit. NASA sent humans to the moon. Bell Labs gave us the transistor. U.S. Steel basically built our modern civilization. Google found somewhat better ways of searching documents in return for selling advertising, plus rip-offs of Hotmail, MS Office, iOS, Facebook, etc.
Google touches normal folks in far more profound ways than NASA's moon shot (How did that turn out? Are we still going to the moon? Oh). Sure, NASA is a force majeure and certainly nothing to be sniffed at, but the efficiency and power of google search on it's own revolutionised the web and was a major spur to its uptake. Google maps was equally revolutionary - available to anyone who could access the internet, and for free, something not done before - Google keeps on doing services like this.
I mean, if you're talking about google being a mere ripoff of other products that 'came first', why not apply the same ruler to NASA (there were previous rocket programs) and steel companies? Bell Labs certainly contributed heaps to everyday culture, but if they were #1, that wouldn't really knock Google very far down the list.
And classifying a steelmaking company as a tech company is a bit far-fetched.
> Google touches normal folks in far more profound ways than NASA's moon shot (How did that turn out? Are we still going to the moon? Oh)
Our GPS satellites wouldn't be in space without the rocket technology developed by NASA.
> and power of google search on it's own revolutionised the web and was a major spur to its uptake.
Google started separating itself from the Yahoo!, Lycos, Excite, etc, pack around very late 1998 into 1999: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#Early_history. That's roughly contemporaneous with "pets.com" which was an exemplar of the .com bubble that most people peg as starting in 1997. In comparison, Amazon was founded in 1994 and IPO'ed in 1997. Hotmail was purchased by MS for $400 million that same year. PG sold Viaweb to Yahoo! in 1998.
The uptake of the web was not only well on its way by the time Google got onto the scene, but the .com bubble was already well on its way by then.
> I mean, if you're talking about google being a mere ripoff of other products that 'came first', why not apply the same ruler to NASA (there were previous rocket programs)
There is a big leap from pre-NASA rocketry (in the U.S.) and post-NASA rocketry. There isn't a big leap (if at all) from iOS to Android. Arguably, MS Office to Google Docs is a regression. A lot of Google's tech is not only derivative, but doesn't even really advance the state of the art. V8 is like Lars Bak's third or fourth implementation of the same basic concept. Gmail didn't really do anything Hotmail didn't do, and the Hotmail acquisition by MS was a decade before Gmail went out of invite-only.
> And classifying a steelmaking company as a tech company is a bit far-fetched.
Steel-making on that scale was cutting edge technology for its time.
The uptake of the web was on its way, but google was an incredible catalyst for it. I remember search at the time and it was woeful - google made it an invisible task that let you get at content much more readily.
GPS is great, sure. Don't interpret me as saying that NASA is a minnow. But to be facetious, good luck using GPS without a map :)
but doesn't even really advance the state of the art
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. You deride gmail for being a ripoff of ye olde Hotmail, but it's a lot more than just 'a free webmail account you can sign up for'.
Steel-making on that scale was cutting edge technology for its time.
There's cutting-edge technology in making shoes, too, but that doesn't make a shoemaking company a 'tech company'.
Google probably didn't surpass Altavista until well into 2000, which would have been after the bubble popped in March 2000. How could Google be the catalyst for internet uptake when the dot-com bubble peaked before it became popular?
As of 2000, when Google had basically no market share, there were already almost 100 million internet users in the U.S., or about a third of the population. It's grown to 80% of the population now, but that's much more attributable to much cheaper computers, cheaper and faster internet access, and the popularization of smart phones making internet access accessible to lower-income people and children.
> You deride gmail for being a ripoff of ye olde Hotmail, but it's a lot more than just 'a free webmail account you can sign up for'.
What is it other than a free e-mail account you can sign up for?
> There's cutting-edge technology in making shoes, too, but that doesn't make a shoemaking company a 'tech company'.
The steel industry was the "tech" industry of its time. It absorbed all the highly talented engineers, made the billionaires, and developed the technology that defined the time.
Google touches more normal folks in far more profound ways than NASA's moon shot. So does Coca-Cola. I'm not sure this as compelling an argument as you think it is.
Landing on the moon was only quite possibly the pinnacle moment in human technological and scientific achievement, and one of the watershed moments of civilization. Google took something that already existed and made it less of a hassle. Its an achievement not even in the same league.
'watershed moment of civilisation'? Really? What profound social changes happened because of the moon shot. Yes, technological achievement, I'm not disputing that. Did it end the cold war? Did it even make a dint on the Vietnam war? In terms of changes to civilisation, the moon shot pales in comparison to the civil rights movements of the same era, along with the end of colonialism.
Besides, I like how you classify google's achievements based only on it's first year product. What did NASA achieve in 1958 that was so profound?
The civil rights movement was important, but there were places in the world at the time where black people could walk into the same restaurant as whites. The end of colonialism was important, if you were Indian. The Vietnam war was important, but then again, World War 2 was important, and so was World War 1, and so was Hannibal crossing the Alps.
With the moon landing, for the first time human beings were able to view our world objectively, in the third person, by having stood on another one. Seeing the moon landings on television changed people's lives. Seeing photos of the earthrise changed people's lives. It was a global event, it was universal. Yes, it was wrapped up in Cold War politics and no it didn't end any wars but ... we stood on another world for the first time.
If that's not a watershed moment in civilization then what was?
You're giving Google credit for internet uptake when the snowball was already rolling down the hill by the time Google became a substantial force in the industry. You and I and most of the adults we knew already used the internet. In the U.S., it has been the younger people, poorer people, older people, and rural people who have driven increased uptake, and I don't think you can attribute that to Google instead of more widespread wireless internet service, cheaper computing devices, etc.
Indeed, the massive social changes from further internet uptake since 2000 seem much more attributable to everyone having 24x7 internet access as a result of smart phones, and I'd give Apple and Verizon/AT&T credit for that. It was Apple that kicked off the trend of putting an internet-capable smart phone in everyone's pocket and Verizon and the telcos that put in place the infrastructure to service them.
I agree but where Google felt different from others, is that all their rip-offs were simpler, faster and free-er than the competition. What other company gives free candies like that ?
Glass, and most importantly cars are even a stronger step in that direction. Actually, if Google cars ever make it to the public, I think it would qualify them for being up there with NASA, Bell and many others, don't you think ?
>>Google found somewhat better ways of searching documents
And yes, that storing and searching the world's information on your finger tips is the biggest problem with regards to information distribution the world has faced so far.
Google didn't invent search engines. It didn't databases. It didn't invent web crawling. It invented a better search engine (Page Rank) that didn't clog up the page with portal crap. Meanwhile, Bell Labs invented the transistor, C, etc. Xerox PARC invented the GUI, Ethernet, and e-mail. Etc.
I think that makes calling Google the "greatest technology organization ever existed" laughable, not to mention historically revisionist.
The "How It Feels" video put you in tears because it's a cinematic compilation of a fantasy lifestyle set to stirring music. The vision you found so compelling is the vision of a life filled with aerial acrobatics, skydiving, exotic travel and the surface indicators of deep personal relationships.
It's a product pitch, not a manifesto. It is to a true vision of a better tomorrow what a thirty-second "I Approve This Message" ad is to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It has been calibrated and hand-crafted by highly skilled advertising professionals to evoke an emotional response that you will imprint onto the product itself.
You are already living in the age of augmented reality. It just hasn't been augmented in quite the way you're hoping for.
When I first read Isaac Asimov's "The Naked Sun" as a kid in the early '90s I was thinking "hey, this is really only science fiction, we will never be like that". With the passing of years it seems that we get closer and closer to what I was actually thinking was only fiction. This is the story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Sun#Plot_introductio...
> The planet has a rigidly controlled population of twenty thousand, and robots outnumber humans ten thousand to one. People are strictly taught from birth to despise personal contact. They live on huge estates, either alone or with their spouse only. Communication is done via holographic telepresence (called viewing, as opposed to in-person seeing). It is likely that the society is based on that in E. M. Forster's 1909 short story "The Machine Stops".
Of course, the irony is that I had forgotten the exact name of the story and I had to use Google and a very fuzzy search to find it. And Google actually found it.
To each his own, I suppose. While you were crying I was repulsed by the intrusion of little bits of low value information and the threat of constant mental overhead in dealing with that little floating box. But more so, I'm repulsed by the thought of having to fight my way past other people's little boxes in order to communicate with them. Progress indeed.
I vaguely remember "the internet" before google and it seriously sucked. Partially, because searching was wading through yahoo-like sites and annoying pop-ups. And before that all was in black&white.
Searching was, and is, imho one of the main usage scenarios. Google toned that sonewhat loud and cluttered act down and improved it, a lot.
I was on the internet half a decade before Google became popular and I'm not even that old. It's wasn't nearly as primitive as you make it out to be. Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo!, etc, weren't as good as Google would ultimately be, but they weren't so bad as to be a different kind of thing. I got DSL around the same time (256 kbits SDSL!) Hotmail and Amazon had been around for years.
in my memories they were more registers/index than free text search engines.
and besides that, some engines seemed in comparison to the clear interface cluttered, since they also were portals.
Voting one down for describing another experience bothers me. The internet in a non-US country might have even been more different than nowaddays.
I went to the San Francisco Glass Foundry--- it was awesome. I felt loss after I had to hand the device back-- as if I was missing one of my senses. :)
Unfortunately as you undoubtably well know, I cannot talk any details due to NDA.
There's not much augmented reality in glass; only the turn-by-turn directions sort of qualify. I think the key thing about glass is that it's hands-free. As handy as smartphones are, it's remarkable how much of a difference not having to take the thing out of your pocket and push a button makes.
(The reason there's not much AR is that AR is very power hungry (you have to leave the camera on).)
what nonsense, sure google's useful, but no more so than bing or any other company that wants to build the same. How about the cellular carriers, or the infrastructure companies that make internet in your house possible. Google was an inevitable company, someone would have made the web searchable...
Google Glass isn't progress, it might lead to some progress, but right now its a delivery platform for commerce and a camera.
The vision. Don't you see it? If we can pull this off, technology thereafter will be embedded into our consciousness. The reality, as we see it, will be transformed. We as human beings will literally become "supermen", in the sense that we will be able to "see" so much more than we could ever imagine. To an extent, this is a human evolution.
Off the top of my head, instant sharing of anything without futzing around with a discrete device. How many moments are missed because a camera wasn't ready or the app took to long to load?
"Ok glass, record a video"
Bam.
If it works in real life at the same speed as in the video, I don't think this effect can be overstated. It allows you to share while still being a participant in the experience (as opposed to the guy just holding a camera).
Instant knowledge extension is the other one. Google's getting quite good at the whole "answering your questions on page one" thing already, but now you don't have to fish around in your pockets for it. Settle arguments with your friends instantly ;)
It's just there. Always in the corner of your vision. There when you want it, easily ignorable when you don't. It's part of your senses, you don't have to think about it, and I can see it becoming as intuitive to ask glass to search for something you want to know on the spot as it is to reach for Google when we want to find something on the internet.
I don't think people understand how big a deal this ease of access is. You've just tied two of your senses into the largest collection of human knowledge ever collected. On a more direct level than has ever been accomplished in the past.
Think about it. How many more questions would you ask if you could just ask on the spot and have an answer right there? How much more would you share if it was truly effortless?
Maybe I'm just drinking the kool-aid here, but I really, really think this will be big.