[incision]

That was interesting.

I've always been a bit curious about Schmidt and what sort of measure someone who is neither in awe nor seeking to impress might make of him.

I think the whole piece is probably best summed up with this line towards then end.

>"What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first."

That certainly makes sense.

[GeneralMayhem]

Only sort of. "Technology" (by which I assume you mean the sort of things produced by Google - namely, software services) and cyber-security are different from Lockheed's products in one extremely important way: anyone has the capacity and reason to use them. Only the government and a handful of large entities (airlines, maybe a few research labs) have any need for the things made by Lockheed and Boeing. But almost every single American uses a Google service, and certainly the entire population of the Internet can use cyber-security solutions.

They're similar in the sense that the government might spend incomprehensible sums of money on them, but that's where it ends, and in that sense airplanes are the same as potatoes. The potential issues with something like Google are very, very different from the steel-and-gears military industrial complex (which is also still going strong), where the companies and government seem to exist solely to justify each other's existence.

[serf]

> Only sort of. "Technology" (by which I assume you mean the sort of things produced by Google - namely, software services) and cyber-security are different from Lockheed's products in one extremely important way: anyone has the capacity and reason to use them.

No. Lockheed and Boeing are defense companies. They sell safety to citizenry in the form of defense through government as a proxy. Anyone enjoying the safety of well maintained national borders employing equipment by either of those groups are 'using' their 'product'.

They (as defense contractors, and not private plane builders) are dependent on capitalization funding -- provided by the people through a vote for elected officials -- who will have the chance to provide a positive or negative pressure on the party in question with regards to allotted subsidies and funding towards that effort.

One way that both groups (both Google and the defense contractors) are much alike is that there is no way that they could have naturally grown to such proportions without anti-trust/monopoly/power-grab laws kicking in. Their (the companies) size is the largest indicator, to me personally, that they are playing ball with the world's governments.