Tag Archives: Tech Industry

Google is like the Federation

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[Garak takes a drink of root beer]
Quark: What do you think?
Garak: It’s vile.
Quark: I know. It’s so bubbly and cloying and happy.
Garak: Just like the Federation.
Quark: And you know what’s really frightening? If you drink enough of it, you begin to like it.
Garak: It’s insidious.
Quark: Just like the Federation.

– Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Way of the Warrior (S4 E01) (and here’s the video)

For a long time, I’ve been quite anti-Google. I’m certain this comes from loyalty to Inktomi, where I used to work once upon a time. In time, it was strengthened due to my dislike of the number of people who joined the cult. Google released and/or acquired a lot of cool apps: maps, Earth, calendar, mail, gears … the list is virtually endless. It could be argued that this was for the benefit of the technology-using community as a whole, but to me it seemed like an incessant grab for geek mindshare.

Eventually, people started to catch on that Google are potentially a very scary organisation. After all, they know what you research on the internet, what you read online, who you send mails to, who you meet with and why. In fact, they probably know as much about you as any given organisation possibly could, and you gave them permission!

However, many months and years of bombardment with applications and the need to be a part of the software community has meant that it is now virtually impossible for me to function without using Google’s tools. They have started to suck the resistance out of me – I’m becoming accustomed to the root beer (or the Kool-Aid, to mix metaphors).

The scariest thing was when I tried out Google Reader, and people had already shared 51 news articles with me, assuming all along that I used it. Gah! I’ve made myself paranoid all over again, just by writing this post. Time to block google.com cookies again.

Google Acquisition Engine

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I’ve been playing with Google’s App Engine as part of their beta and I started thinking about what benefit Google got from it. Presumably, there will be some kind of monetary payback as those apps which exceed their “free” limit then start paying, but at the prices they are charging it seems unlikely that this will be a big money-spinner.

Google like to use Python. They purchased Jaiku over Twitter because Jaiku was Python and Twitter was Ruby (I’m sure there were other reasons too. A lot of their APIs are in Python, as are many of their own apps.

Google only releases big scale apps. They released Google Calendar and it allegedly had over 1 million signups in the first week. Google Analytics likewise had stupid numbers of signups (so much so that they couldn’t cope with the volume and had to shut down registration). In fact, this kind of “Instant-One-Million-Users” (that needs its own acronym) means that Google can’t afford to release anything unless it is massively scaleable.

Calendar was a home-grown app for them, whereas Analytics was an acquisition. Maybe this is one reason why the former was able to cope with IOMU and the latter wasn’t. With this in mind, enter App Engine.

Now you can write apps that meet Google’s criteria: they are Pythonic, massively scaleable and best yet: already run on Google’s infrastructure. So, when someone writes the next big web app, it just got a whole lot easier for Google to acquire them and then avoid death by IOMU.

IT industry questions

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mj writes:

  • are university degrees worth the bother?
  • are universities correctly servicing the IT industry (and specifically the games dev market) with skills, knowledge, toolsets?
  • why have IT graduates decreased from 1900 in 2004 to 600 in 2007?
  • are we seeing a knock on effect from technology failures in the province, e.g. Nortel, Seagate
  • with the improvement of toolsets, a lone hobbyist can create ‘flickr’ or ‘facebook’. Is this relevant?
  • will we see an upsurge again with demand from Citigroup, Aepona, ATG etc?

Degrees are only useful to get you your first job. If you’ve got your first IT job without a degree, then you don’t need one. After that, it should be possible to achieve what you want with a bit of hard work. At least that’s what I’ve found.

I don’t think universities can be blamed (too much) for not servicing the industry, just given the nature of each. A degree takes 3-4 years to complete, and the content of it is usually created before the degree starts. 3-4 years is a long time in computer terms: 2-3 generations of processor speeds, anywhere from 1-4 major releases of software/language/OS. Really, the best a degree can hope to do is teach good guiding principles and a reasonably relevant language (and yes, I do think Java is probably the best language to learn at Uni).

As a recruiting manager, I’ve found that IT graduates are decreasing for two reasons: the pay is not what it used to be, and you can’t become a millionaire overnight any more. Ironic, given that starting pay has now gone up and some 2.0 companies *are* becoming overnight millionaires. This same trend in hiring is across the world, not just Northern Ireland.

Technology failures: maybe – however, both of those companies are large multi-nationals who opened an outsourced hardware plant in the province. To jump ahead to your last bullet point, these new companies are doing the same but for software/services, which (arguably) has a lower capital investment and, given the more dynamic nature of it, a higher chance of success. I think Northern Ireland really needs some more home-grown successes, and preferably ones that aren’t as staid as Lagan.

Toolsets: it’s semi-relevant. See my earlier post.