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  3. Google’s Google problem A)Google is killing Google Reader. Use of Google Reader, a tool, by the way, for reading online content

Google’s Google problem A)Google is killing Google Reader. Use of Google Reader, a tool, by the way, for reading online content

admin2014-05-30  42
问题                         Google’s Google problem
A)Google is killing Google Reader. Use of Google Reader, a tool, by the way, for reading online content via RSS was concentrated among a small group of relatively intense users. As it happens, that small group includes quite a lot of people who write for or as part of their living. And so Google Reader has been mourned over, angrily at times, a bit more than the many other Google services that have come and gone.
B)It isn’t that hard to imagine what Google was thinking when it made this decision. It’s a big company, but even big companies have finite resources, and devoting those precious resources to something that isn’t making money and isn’t judged to have much in the way of development potential is not an attractive option. Dropping Reader isn’t going to hurt the company’s business.
C)Yet this little contretemps(令人尴尬的事)may suggest bigger trouble ahead for Google and big changes for the internet. One immediate effect is relatively easy to anticipate. John Hempton makes a nice point here: Google is in the process of abandoning its mission. Google’s stated mission is to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google no longer cares. It seems what they care about is mass-markets.
D)Google has asked us to build our lives around it: to use its e-mail system, its search engines, its maps, its calendars, its cloud-based apps and storage services, its video- and photo-hosting services, and on and on and on. Google wants us to use its services in ways that provide it with interesting and valuable information, and eyeballs. If a particular Google experiment isn’t cutting it in that category, then Google may feel justified in axing it.
E)But that makes it increasingly difficult for Google to have success with new services. Why commit to using and coming to rely on something new if it might be pulled away at some future date? This is especially problematic for "social" apps that rely on network effects. Even a bad social service may thrive if it obtains a critical mass. Yanking away services beloved by early adopters almost guarantees that critical masses can’t be obtained: not, at any rate, without the provision of an incentive or commitment mechanism to protect the would-be users from the risk of losing a vital service.
F)There may be bigger implications still, however. As I said, Google has asked us to build our lives around it, and we have responded. This response entails(势必导致)a powerful self-reinforcement mechanism: both providers and users of information and other services change their behaviour as a result of the availability of a Google product. You can see this on a small scale with Reader. People design their websites and content based on the assumption that others, via an RSS reader, will come across and read that content in a certain way. And readers structure their reading habits, and ultimately their mental models of what information is available and where, based on the existence of this tool. If you then pull away the product at the heart of that system, you end up causing significant disruption(混乱), assuming there aren’t good alternatives available.
G)The issue becomes a bit more obvious when you think about something like search. Many of us now operate under the assumption that if we want to find something we will be able to do so quickly and easily via Google search. If I want an idea for a unique gift for someone, I can put in related search terms and feel pretty confident that I’ll get back store websites and blogs and Pinterest pages and newspaper stories and pictures all providing possible matches.
H)If I’m a researcher, I know I can quickly find relevant academic papers, data, newspaper accounts, expert analysis, and who knows what else related to an enormous range of topics. Once we all become comfortable with that state of affairs we quickly begin optimising(优化)the physical and digital resources around us. And once we all become comfortable with that, we begin rearranging our mental architecture. We stop memorising key data points and start learning how to ask the right questions. We begin to think differently. We stop keeping a mental model of the physical geography of the world around us, because why bother? We can call up an incredibly detailed and accurate map of the world, complete with satellite and street-level images, whenever we want. The bottom line is that the more we all participate in this world, the more we come to depend on it.
I)What Google has actually done is create a powerful infrastructure(基础设施). The shape of that infrastructure influences everything that goes online. And it influences the allocation of mental resources of everyone who interacts with the online world. But there isn’t much to the real human world that isn’t shaped by the mental activity of the people in it! That’s a lot of power to put in the hands of a company that now seems interested, mostly, in identifying core mass-market services it can use to maximise its return on investment. Now in the short run, that may mostly be a problem for all of us. To the extent that we become worried about this phenomenon, we may go out and find back-up services or other alternatives. This will be less convenient and more costly, in terms of time and money, but those sufficiently foresighted(预见的)might feel it’s a better option than opening up gmail one day to read that the email service, and the 10-year’s worth of communication it holds, will soon be gone.
J)But in the long run that’s a problem for Google. Because we tend not to entrust(委托)this sort of critical public infrastructure to the private sector. Network externalities are all fine and good to ignore so long as they mainly apply to the sharing of news and pictures from a weekend trip with college friends. Once they concern large amount of economic output and the cognitive activity of millions of people, it is difficult to keep the government out. Maybe that obstacle will be sufficient to keep Google providing its most heavily used products. But maybe not.
K)I find myself thinking again of the brave new world of the industrial city, when new patterns of interaction led to enormous changes in economic activity, in culture and personal behaviour, and in the way we think. We upgraded ourselves, in terms of education and social norms, to maximise the return to urban life. I think we, meaning users of the web and the companies that provide its blood and bones, are only beginning to deal with the implications of a world awash(充斥的)in information.
A bad social service may become successful provided it gets a critical mass.
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答案E
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