Corvus Consulting

UPDATE

On April 12 Opera was approved for the App Store. I’m not sure if they should be happy to be in or insulted that they’re not threatening, but I’m glad to see it. Congrats, team Opera.

ORIGINAL POST

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Opera browser. I used it when it was among the only ad-supported online properties, paid for a license to support them, and evangelized it to coworkers and friends. It had mouse gestures, it was FAST, it could render as a small screen interface before anyone knew why they’d want to. Then I moved to a Mac, where Opera had yet to go, and never really went back when Opera did come to that platform.

Opera has done so much right but rarely receives the credit, much less market share, that it deserves. The company’s last major strategy shift was to position their browser as the premier choice for mobile use. But Apple, Google and RIM are eating up the mobile market and all three roll their own browsers. Opera is, once again, being left out in the cold but this time isn’t so quietly accepting of its fate.

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If you don’t know the story of the Magician’s Apprentice, you should, because it’s a fantastic cautionary tale for the age of the technological commons. When the wizard, who is older and wiser, steps out for a while, the apprentice decides to use one of his spells to naively ‘make life easier’. Enchanted brooms begin to carry in buckets of water, but they don’t stop and multiply at every attempt to stop them, leading to an uncontrollable flood.

With Google’s engineering-first, consequences-later approach, we’re hitting a point where the brooms are getting out of control and the water is starting to rise. With Buzz, we have yet another deployment of their notion of a well-meaning science experiment that ignores our human reality. While it’s never classy to link to TechCrunch, this post by Robin Wauters deserves mention for bringing to light a failure in trust and social savvy on Google’s part. The quotable section is actually pulled from another blog that is now behind a password wall:

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.
There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?
My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

The practice of foisting a new social networking reality onto people who happen to use your product is inexcusable, and Google is not alone in doing so but its mass (like that of Facebook’s) brings along with it the responsibility of treading more carefully.

Given Google’s preference to beg for forgiveness rather than ask for permission, their impulsive changes to the terms of social engagement through their tools have tarnished the trust around their brand, and may have put people in physical danger at the extreme end of things. The problem is, there’s no wise wizard who can come back and right the mess that these well-meaning apprentice’s have made.

Things are moving fast these days.

Only a few weeks ago (er, make that months), I wrote that major search engines were finding themselves ill-equipped to keep up with rapidly-emerging trends, while Twitter and other social networks were becoming good at this realtime reporting. I also thought that Twitter’s major business direction had been set straight for search given the focus on search throughout its website experience, and that they were bound to collide somehow.

After a long hot summer and into autumn I read that new deals with Twitter allow Bing and Google to include tweets in search results. Bing scores a second time through Microsoft’s stake in Facebook by also drawing in status updates from that community. These deals help solve for the search engines’ the problem of knowing what parts of the web are changing so that they can index significant changes almost immediately after they happen.

But this post isn’t really about what I got it right. Rather it’s about what parts I didn’t see coming, and what can be gleaned from that, which turns out to be more interesting.

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Have you ever wondered if the web is the first medium where businesses could make something deeply valued by customers but struggle with how to actually make money from their innovation?

Radio and television must have faced the same problem, and born lacking a way to meter and charge individual use, broadcasters turned to predominantly ad-based subsidies for free content traded with consumers for their attention. If content producers for radio and TV had been able to control distribution like newspapers did (by nature of selling a physical medium) from the start, I suspect we’d live in a very different media universe. For starters, maybe we wouldn’t have to wonder about ironically-combined cable channel bundles.

Like TV and Radio, the web delivers content people value, and has tried to ape the ad-supported model with dubious results, the most dubious being the rapid consolidation into a monoculture ad economy where one player outweighs them all. The ad-supported model doesn’t seem to scale enough to float really successful web content or services. While the web can deliver on the alternative, metering and collecting payment for content and services, the culture has been saturated by TV and radio to expect the content for free. Now that’s a conundrum.

But you know what, none of that matters, because OMG Twitter changed its homepage. The change is more than aesthetics, and I think it shows how they intend to escape the conundrum of high value and the revenue vacuum.

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Among the many rumors of products that Google would one day ship, a home-spun operating system has been among the more persistent and esoteric. What would such an OS look like? How would they ever get it into OEM hardware? Would it be sold or ad-supported? As with Android, the answer is not so much the arrival of what’s expected (g-phone, anyone?) as a reveal that re-frames the original questions.

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