Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercive change) caused by others, by restraining the freedom of others to act. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be of persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems or any other entity or phenomenon vulnerable to unwanted change. Security mostly refers to protection from hostile forces, but it has a wide range of other senses: for example, as the absence of harm (e.g. freedom from want); as the presence of an essential good (e.g. food security); as resilience against potential damage or harm (e.g. secure foundations); as secrecy (e.g. a secure telephone line); as containment (e.g. a secure room or cell); and as a state of mind (e.g. emotional security).
Back when I started writing this blog, hacking was something that was done against ‘the man’, usually as a political statement. Now breaches are part of organised crime’s day to day operations. The Chinese government so thoroughly hacked Nortel that all its intellectual property was stolen along with commercial secrets like bids and client lists. The result was the firm went bankrupt. Russian ransomware shuts down hospitals across Ireland. North Korean government sanctioned hackers robbed 50 million dollars from the central bank of Bangladesh and laundered it in association with Chinese organised crime.
Now it has spilled into the real world with Chinese covert actions, Russian contractors in the developing world and hybrid warfare being waged across central Europe and the middle east.
Will 5G Kill Free WiFi? | Motherboard – all I am going to point out here is that Intel backed WiMax versus LTE for 4G. Intel has consistently had issues in the wireless space. The use cases between 5G and free WiFi are likely to be very different. The potential low latency of 5G will be attractive in certain use cases. I don’t think it will be a consumer product for a while yet due to network build out issues in comparison to free WiFi (or the paid variety. More wireless related content here.
GSM gateways were common features of the 1990s and early 2000s telephone landscape. At the time, phone companies charged eye-wateringly high sums for overseas calls. In those dreary pre-Skype and pre-WhatsApp days, if you wanted instant contact with loved ones the phone was your only option. GSM gateways themselves, banks of SIM cards, worked a bit like a modern VPN does for an internet connection: you call the gateway, then once connected you enter the overseas number you want to be connected to. Government officials have claimed they frustrate surveillance by spy agencies and others because identifying caller data is not forwarded through the gateway, making it difficult to eavesdrop on a particular call going overseas.
Social media went into overdrive on Monday evening UK time when Google announced a formal restructure of all its businesses, creating a new company called Alphabet. For the man on the street, Google means Search, YouTube, Drive (including Docs, Sheets etc.), email and Android. For the average marketer you can throw various advertising products and Google Analytics into the mix. For business IT managers, it is everything from productivity, software-as-a-service and possibly as a supplier of a search appliance for its internal servers.
Three different customer types exist and a product set that grows layer-by-layer like an onion. The bulk of Google’s revenue currently comes from advertising due to the clever technology behind it. One can see from Microsoft’s move to the cloud that there is less revenue in cloud computing than in Google’s current business, so when advertising reaches a natural ceiling for growth, services will provide an incremental benefit at best.
Android was designed as a conduit to Google services and for advertising to venture out into the mobile space. But the world’s most popular mobile operating system is not without its own issues. Despite all phones essentially looking the same, there is a massive amount of fragmentation in the Android marketplace, which makes life harder for developers. Google is also a developer, so building applications that it can build loyalty through and make money from becomes more difficult.
Secondly, an appreciable amount of Android devices (those sold in China) and many sold in Russia don’t use Google services and provide little to no opportunity for Google advertising.
This means that Google is forced to make big bets in very different sectors. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, partly because of their entrepreneurial nature to explore new opportunities, built in an ability to scale Google beyond the business lines that I have outlined above. This was apparent from their original IPO share prospectus and accompanying letter. Xerox is famous in Silicon Valley lore for fumbling the future, by inventing lots of products that would be recognisable to us today in the late 1960s and early 1970s, only to see a corporate head office miss the boat. Brin and Page would have had some awareness of this. Microsoft’s inability to leapfrog beyond its core business successfully is probably also a factor for consideration.
Alphabet formalises the framework that Page and Brin had been working to for a number of years.
So what does this mean to Google?
For the foreseeable future Alphabet will be more of the same for Google. We’ve the seen the business scale back services. By September last year Google had closed down 30 services. It has cut back the functionality of Google Adplanner as a reference tool, to just focus on sales. Google has continued to prune back services such as Google+ (a challenging task given the tentacles + has across Google’s services). The changes inside Google for staffers also reflect similar moves towards profit optimisation, move away from experimentation and being a ‘mensch’.
The biggest move was to get rid of the 20% of time engineers could devote to projects that interested them. The truth is since at least 2009, the Google myth of people working there to change the world rather than delivering profit hasn’t held sway for a great deal of their staff.
On the outside Google will still likely have playful swag and cool offices, but the reality is that it will be more of a ‘normal’ business. That means that we won’t see the next Facebook coming from within Google and that whilst the speed of evolution will continue to run along at the same pace, substantial innovation probably won’t. This kind of business requires a different kind of leader to Page, and by appointing Sundar Pichai, will create a cultural break from the past. Pichai is likely to be able to get more revenue out of the Google ‘cash cow’ to help drive innovation in these other areas.
Page and Brin are freer to bring their energy to the other businesses in Alphabet. For instance, keeping Nest out of Google allows it to work easier with Google competitors like Apple and Microsoft as part of a wider eco-system.
Lastly, it could be an effort to ring fence Google’s anti-trust woes within the existing business and prevent restrictions being imposed against its newer businesses because of the past sins of the core business.
So what does Alphabet mean for marketers?
Google is likely to pursue a steady as she goes approach. The focus will be to optimise revenue, so there will be tension with agencies on advertising practices. We’ve already seen this, with Google restricting methods of buying YouTube advertising. These changes will impact the advertising technology business around programmatic advertising.
The picture with SEO is more about slow and steady change; Google has evolved its Panda index changes to a rolling change rather than the massive shake-ups of old.
More Google related articles here. Originally written for Racepoint Global’s now defunct CommsTalk blog.
Consolidation in Italy as Wind, 3 ink €21.8bn merger | TotalTelecom – I I hope that it won’t affect 3 UK roaming? I wouldn’t be surprised if 3 did similar deals in other mature European markets like the UK. Li Ka Shing is no one’s fool and wireless is mature and capital intensive. More wireless related posts here.
Official Google Blog: Everything in its right place – downsizing of Google+. The move to break it up is viewed by many as a defeat, it also makes sense when one thinks of app constellations, though I cannot help think of Brad Garlinghouse’s famous ‘peanut butter manifesto’ at Yahoo! nine years earlier. Though that was a blatant grab for political power, it resonates with some of what seems to be happening at Google in terms of retrenchment
Daring Fireball: Safari vs. Chrome: Power Consumption – interesting article power consumption. Power consumption has come a long way, when I got my first laptop, an old Apple PowerBook 165, it would last me a couple of hours in the university library if I wasn’t able to find a power outlet.
With the first Intel powered MacBook Pro was just about able to last a days worth of note taking at a conference if I was careful. The jump between these two machines power consumption was hardware. It is interesting how Apple Safari is now focusing on software performance to effect a positive difference in power consumption.
China considers limiting third party online payments-Shanghai Daily – presumably the Chinese government feels that limiting third party online payments has anti corruption and tax dodging benefits. It would also be a good why of preventing capital flight out of China via third party online payments. More finance related content here.
Here’s What’s Next for the Future of Amphibious Warfare | VICE News – reminds me of the aircraft carrier sprawl in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. In this novel, refugee rafts and ships were secured to an aircraft carrier to cross the Pacific to the US. This seems to be similar to the seabasing model articulated as the future of amphibious warfare. My big question (admittedly based on watching saving Private Ryan etc as my only source of reference) is would this model present too large a target for defence forces? What’s the advantage of this approach to amphibious warfare?
In a tale of fact imitating fiction the US Navy is looking at ways to support the military in future conflicts by creating bases which allow ships to act as a combined space, which they call sea basing (or seabasing). The reason for this is in battles with the likes of China they may not have the luxury of a nearby land base like they have had in the Middle East, so they need to provide a flexible platform that will perform a similar function including floating docks and logistics.
Being out at sea and operating in this way helps put the force out of range of enemy weapons as well, or what the US Marines describe as exploit the sea’s maneuver space.
This includes ramps and sensors that would allow service men and equipment to exchanged from ship-to-ship with as much ease as moving around a base on land. Presumably this would have some sort of affect in terms of increasing the data network connections between ships to help them function better and more cohesively.
The idea of seabasing echoes the carrier and lashed together boats of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Snow Crash is a classic work of cyberpunk fiction written in 1994. In the book refugees play a key part in the plot. The refugees have attached themselves to a privatised aircraft carrier owned by a media company that is heading to the US. More design related content here.
