At a time when people are still wowing over the Google-YouTube deal (and wondering why their 2.0 company didn’t get bought for $1.6 billion), it’s good to know that Marc Cantor is dead down on it. Not because of the copyright issues or “limited” advertising potential of YouTube that others cite, but apparently because he just doesn’t like Google anymore.
To wit, he names Orkut as a failed social network; knocks Blogger as an also-ran; disregards Google Base as pointless; labels AdSense a $5 billion cash machine for Sergey, Larry and Eric; tosses aside Gmaps, Gmail, Gcalendar, Gscholar, Gbooks, and Gtalk as “unrelated, random output of the labs, thrown up to justify their R&D expenditures;” and closes with an ominous warning:
Oh yah–Google values social networks as long as they are THEIR social networks. Lets see how willing Google will be to inter-connect their social networks with others. To give birth to ecosystems which feed off of their social networks. My bet is that they’ll be more onerous than MySpace.
This ain’t open platforms folks–this is new age lock-in. Google ain’t about social networking Bambi–its about new age greed, lock-in and old school politics and business models, just twisted a bit.
It may be too early to talk about the fall of Google, but I wonder what the GoogleWatch folks have to say about all this.