a thaumaturgical compendium

Newegg demonstrates that even in OS-land, market demand drives pricing.

Hal Varian, who is generally someone worth listening to, has a post up on the Google Blog about why he thinks his company (yes, he works for Google) continues to dominate the market. After dismissing economies of scale, lock-in, and network effects, he goes on to say:

The answer, at least in my opinion, is a much older economic concept called “learning by doing” that was first formalized by Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow back in 1962. It refers to the widely-observed phenomenon that the longer a company has been doing something, the better it gets at doing it.

This may, indeed, be a part of Google’s success. I think a lot of technologists think that they can come up with a golden bullet that will lead to Google’s demise as a market leader. No doubt they think this because Google had its own golden bullet, the use of linkage analysis to filter results. But it would be a mistake to think that this particular approach to search filtering is what defines Google as a search engine or as a company.

First, while Varian offhandedly dismisses the “usual culprits,” clearly Google benefits from all of them. He suggests as much in his dismissals. Yes, there are large datacenters available, but not without a fairly significant amount of capital layout. I can’t, personally, go and buy a Google-sized datacenter tuned for search, even if I had the capital available to me. In fact, I suspect the only way to win in the search business at this point is distributing as much of the work (crawling, indexing, etc.) as possible. But as the Wikia rollout has shown, it’s not the scale of your datacenter that matters, it’s the scale of your index. Google can rely not only on the systems to mine that index, but on an existing “balance” of mined sites to draw on.

He suggests that there is no lock-in, since a user can easily choose to visit another search engine, but this ignores the significant—if largely hidden—cost of learning to navigate a new site and the results pages it throws up at you. Indeed, the only way to overcome those switching costs would be to first clone Google’s user interface and then slowly ween users to your alternative offering. (Think Word’s ability to clone WordPerfect’s commands.) And then, how do you convince people to switch for what appears, at least on the surface, to be a clone?

He dismisses the network effects model, and certainly the classical view (that the value of the product is affected by the number of users) doesn’t seem to apply to Google, but the common sense view that the name is familiar, and becomes more familiar as people use the internet and find it on pages that they have found through Google, means that it is hard to break into that cycle.

The idea that people go to Google simply because it has become, through experience, the best search engine, has merit. They have managed to “tune” their engine to best match the average user’s needs. But this isn’t the only reason—and may not even be the most important reason—it is the most popular engine.

Or, to use his metaphor: yes, Google’s got a great recipe. But if you really think your recipe is all there is to the business, you shouldn’t mind too much sharing your raw ingredients. No? I didn’t think so.

Update: Not surprisingly, Eszter says it better.

I’ve been talking about this for years, and people seem to just think I’m crazy, but it looks like Google doesn’t. It looks like they will be investing in Space Data Corp’s floating SkyWiFi. Basically, these are hydrogen-filled WiFi repeaters floating around at high altitudes and providing internet and cell-phone coverage in rural areas. I still don’t see why a few dozen of these couldn’t be floated over Manhattan. At the very least, it would provide helicopter pilots with some entertainment.

It also looks like it is seeding a new kind of extreme geocaching. From the WSJ article:

Recovery missions can get intense. Workers have had to pluck transceivers out of trees in Louisiana, rappel down rocky cliffs in Arizona, trudge through swamps and kayak across ponds. Space Data pays them $100 per transceiver recovered.

So, Google is buying wireless in the sky, and under the sea; there’s clearly a trend here. Does this point to a Google network? If so—if they are generating an alternative end-to-end network—it would have a number of repercussions, not least, likely moving them from a supporter of net neutrality to a more ambivalent position.

I think the best place to live in Manhattan would be aboard a houseboat in the 79th street boat basin. That dream is actually not as far out of reach as some. For the first time in decades, the city is allowing new residential slip rentals, which average less than $500 a month. Moor something like this 67 foot live-aboard trawler in that spot, currently for sale on eBay for $50,000, and you end up with triple the square feet of most apartments in this area, at less than a twentieth of the price. All that, and two blocks from the subway, and four blocks from the Natural History Museum.

While my lovely partner and I disagree on few things, I would jump on this in a New York minute, and she is not nearly as keen on the idea.

Never thought I would encourage sock puppets on my blog, but Kiki & Bubu (with a guest appearance from Trekkie Monster’s cousin) explains that the seeming shift of ownership to workers is just another version of false consciousness. I don’t happen to agree entirely, but it’s an interesting way of presenting the message.

Via Tomorrow’s Professor I find this list of the top 25 strangest university courses. First, an observation: few of these strike me as all that strange. Perhaps it is because I am in a field—communication—that is often associated with courses about popular culture that might otherwise be considered trivial (courses in soap opera and games shows, for example), I don’t have the hangup about a course sounding serious. When I taught Cyberporn & Society, some people said students wouldn’t sign up because they wouldn’t want that course title on their transcript. I got a number of other suggestions that would raise fewer red flags, so to speak; things like “Historical and Technological Effects of Erotica,” which, once appropriately truncated, would save embarrassment. Of course, I would find it embarrassing to avoid naming a course what it is about.

But it’s more than that. Why, as professors, should we not want to “sell” our courses. If you were a student would you rather take a course—to take an example from that list—entitled “Introduction to Material Culture” or would you be more likely to sign up for “Sex, Rugs, Salt & Coal.” I know which I would pick. And yes, it’s because I’ll expect the latter to be more entertaining, more fun. Is there something wrong with that expectation?

My greatest teaching weakness (among many, I assure you—soon I will share my most recent student reviews with you), is that I can’t stand (a) teaching from a text and (b) recycling courses. The idea of planning a course and then teaching it several times did not, until recently, appeal to me. Now I am getting into re-usable objects for teaching, and particularly online, that makes a lot of sense. But I am very much a fan of the one-off course, a course that organizes the material in an idiosyncratic way to appeal to an audience of students. I’m also a fan of extreme user-driven courses. Although I had an agenda for our “Communication, Media, and Society” course this semester, in past semesters, I’ve gone in and we’ve assembled the syllabus on the first day of class, according to what the students wanted. I expect I will do something similar when I teach it in the fall.

Traditional curricula tend to mess with this. We have a core set of courses we have to teach, and significant changes to that core actually have to go through a state board (even though we are a private university—go figure). My Cyberporn & Society course was a bit of a Trojan Horse. It took a salacious topic and used it to talk about some pretty core issues in communication research. Sure, it was about cyberporn, but it also provided a back door to talking about the effects of media (Does pornography cause rape? What do we mean when we say “cause”? How can we measure social effects?), the role of regulation (Why do we have a First Amendment? Should free speech cover non-political speech, and why? What are the limits on how communication law can be structured and enforced?), and the relationship of technology to society (What role did the sale of pornography play in the diffusion of VCRs? Did increased router sales lead to the wider distribution and acceptance of pornography, or was the relationship the other way around?). Sure, that’s a little “sneaky,” but it is also the way good classes work. I still remember the lessons of professors who bothered to make their material interesting. Unfortunately, this leads to a bit of a gap between what the catalog copy says, and what you do (or can do) in a course.

Vive la special topics course! When I am king, students will be allowed to major in “special topics,” and choose from only the interesting courses on a campus.

I registered a domain for a non-profit organization some time ago. They decided to let the site go, and so the domain was left open. It’s a very specific domain, of no interest to anyone other than the original organization.

Received the following email from Ken Palm at securethatdomain.com. Now, there is plenty of sleaze in the domain business: I get “renewal notices” via mail for some of my domains from people looking to charge ridiculous sums, who assume that someone will just pay the bill thinking it is legitimate, for example. But it was hard to read the following email as anything short of the extortion it is. It’s difficult to read “Please understand, I’m not saying that this WILL happen if you don’t buy the domain,” without the stereotyped voice of a mafia enforcer. “You know, sometimes accidents happen. These old shops just go up in flames. Maybe you should buy some insurance…”

In case you are wondering, his “acquisition costs and modest profit” he is hoping to be reimbursed for total $257. The joke of it is, he only needs to hit one of these jackpots from someone who doesn’t want their organization to be associated with a porn site to make up for the thousand that ignore him.

Don’t get me wrong, although I don’t think it’s good, I can understand why a market for trading desirable names has come about, and if you want to buy a “future” in a name like rutabaga.com, that seems reasonable. If, on the other hand, you are looking for easy marks and (hint, hint, nudge, nudge) suggestion that someone might put up a pornographic site that would confuse your visitors, this is another ballgame. Along with things like Site Finder, it represents real bottom-feeding. If this company is enabling typosquatters, particularly for .org or .edu domains, it seems like something the FTC should be interested in. I’m not saying they WILL be interested in it…

Recently, [expurgated].com expired and went into a domain name auction. We acquired it and, since you own the .org version of this domain name, we wanted to provide you with the opportunity to own the preferred .com version. Our company specializes in recovering preferred expiring domains and either selling them to individuals such as yourself or building out our own web presence on those valuable domains.

Why would an Organization or Non-profit want the .com version of a domain?

• .Com is the strongest brand on the internet. When people think of a website, they intuitively think “.com”. Odds are people trying to get to your website are inadvertently going to [expurgated].com because they assume that’s where they can find you.

• Owning the .com can help you protect your organization’s reputation….

It may sound far fetched at first, but only a few years ago the domain name WhiteHouse.com was a site littered with pornography. Imagine users surprise when they wanted to find out about White House tours and end up seeing the offensive material there. (Since then, someone else bought the site and took down the offensive material)

The last thing you’d want to happen is for someone to build a website at [expurgated].com which contains negative or even offensive content.

Please understand, I’m not saying that this WILL happen if you don’t buy the domain. Odd are that it will NOT happen. But, if you’re interested in securing your reputation I strongly encourage you to consider buying the .com today.

If you’d like to own you can buy it now by covering our acquisition costs and a modest profit.

If you have any interest I encourage you to act quickly because this domain name will only be offered for sale for a limited time.

Click Here For Pricing On
https://secure.securethatdomain.com/buy0.php

https://secure.securethatdomain.com/buy0.php

Please advise,

Ken Palm
ken@securethatdomain.com
tel: 563.823.4644

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