trinityw82y: Making Money From the Internet

Yesterday's announcement that Google's Eric Schmidt will be handing the CEO reins back to co-founder Larry Page came as a shock, but with the company's aura of invincibility fading, and its core business showing signs of age, the time was right for a change. There was "an example every hour," of how triumvirate decision-making by Schmidt, Page, and co-founder Segrey Brin was hurting the company, Schmidt said. If Google wants to assure investors and consumers that rumors of its looming insignificance have been greatly exaggerated, there are a few key things that Larry has to do.

No. 1: Fix Search

Google's cash cow is its online-search advertising business, but the search results are starting to look awfully spammy. Between content farms that flood the Internet with meaningless search bait and black hat optimizers that use sleazy tricks to get top results, there are entire industries devoted to gaming Google's algorithms.

People who depend on Google for their livelihood have started to notice, and consumers are showing signs of getting antsy: There is a reason Microsoft's Bing quickly picked up 12 percent of the search market, and it's not because of its Gossip Girl product placements, or even vastly superior search results. Google has also drawn some ill will with an aggressive, some say illegal, tendency to push its own services to the top of the page.

It looks like Larry gets the seriousness of the problem. Friday, on day one of his regime, Google acknowledged the issue in a blog post, even as it downplayed its severity. "Reading through some of these recent articles, you might ask whether our search quality has gotten worse," said principal engineer Matt Cutts. "The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better."

It will take more than a wonky breakdown, but it's a start.

No. 2: Find Growth

The aforementioned cash cow is still so lucrative that it's easy to forget that Google has never really succeeded in any other business. Despite the ubiquity of Gmail and YouTube, they are not yet successful stand-alone businesses. YouTube only recently made it into the black after incurring hundreds of million of dollars in losses over the years.

It's not like Google isn't aware of the problem. Witness the frenzied diversification into anything that looks hot: cars that drives themselves, social networks, and yesterday's long-expected news of a Groupon clone. But trying everything hasn't produced much of anything.

Larry needs to ditch the side projects and focus on the most promising ones: the Android mobile-phone operating system, and the mobile ad network AdMob, which even makes money from iPhones as it serves up 2 billion ads a day.

No. 3: Stop the Brain Drain

Here's an enigma for Larry to unravel: Why does a company with five-star chefs, high-tech nap pods, and free massages have to throw millions of dollars in cash money at employees to get them to stay?

Part of the problem is Google's convoluted management structure, which Page is clearly trying to fix. If a team has been working on an amazing project for a year, only to hear that it overlaps with someone else's pet project, who wouldn't want to jump ship? But it also has to do with Google's size and a potentially fatal inability to face up to an unpleasant reality. From what we hear, there's reluctance from some of the old guard to accept that Google is a massive corporation now.

There is a major intangible at play as well, something that may not be easy for someone who is more Chief Engineer than Chief Executive to grapple with. If the ambitious go-getters that make it through Google's onerous interview process sense that the cool, sexy projects are happening at Facebook, Apple, or some stealth VC project with no name, then no amount of money is going to keep them on side, no matter how big a money truck Google backs up to their cubicle.

Which leads to....

No. 4: Consider a Personality Transplant

Tech bloggers were smitten with Eric Schmidt, but for all the wrong reasons. Sure, he grew Google into a $200 billion behemoth, but he also had a weakness for creepy Big Brother jokes delivered so dryly that no one could be sure he was joking. Contrast that with the controlling and charismatic Steve Jobs, surely one of the best salesmen in modern history, with a reality distortion field that may have made enemies but also bestowed an ineffable cool on his entire company.

Larry, by all accounts, makes Eric Schmidt look like Steve Jobs.

Ken Auletta explains:

He is a very private man, who often in meetings looks down at his hand-held Android device, who is not a comfortable public speaker, who hates to have a regimented schedule, who thinks it is an inefficient use of his time to invest too much of it in meetings with journalists or analysts or governments. As C.E.O., the private man will have to become more public.

Google's engineer-driven approach to new products has been a long-standing problem. (Google Wave, anybody?) Unlike Apple, it seems to build for engineers and developers, not consumers. That's great when you're making an open source mobile platform like Android, which is hot on the iPhone's tail due to its openness and potential ubiquity across multiple carriers and devices. It's not so great when you made everyone on Gmail opt into Google Buzz ’ or for creating fanboys and girls who want to use your products, even if they have to anyway.

Either way, Larry, you're going to need some charm to lend Google the same cool factor it had last time you were in charge. Maybe start by looking up from your Android phone every once in a while.

You're probably reading this on junk. And I'm not talking about newsprint - industry woes aside, that's high-quality stuff. But if you're on a computer or an iPad, and you're not plugged into an Internet jack in the wall? Junk, then.

But it's not your MacBook or your tablet that's so crummy. It's the spectrum it's using.

Spectrum, in the words of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, is the economy's "invisible infrastructure." It's the interstate system for information that travels wirelessly. It's how you get radio in your car, service on your cellphone and satellite to your television. It's also how you get WiFi.

But not all spectrum is created equal. "Beachfront spectrum" is like a well-paved road. Lots of information can travel long distances on it without losing much data. But not all spectrum is so valuable.

In 1985, there was a slice of spectrum that was too crummy for anyone to want. It was so weak that the radiation that microwaves emit could mess with it. So the government released it to the public. As long as whatever you were doing didn't interfere with what anyone else was doing, you could build on that spectrum. That's how we got garage-door openers and cordless phones. Because the information didn't have to travel far, the junk spectrum was good enough. Later on, that same section of junk spectrum became the home for WiFi - a crucial, multibillion-dollar industry. A platform for massive technological innovation. A huge increase in quality of life.

There's a lesson in that: Spectrum is really, really important. And not always in ways that we can predict in advance. Making sure that spectrum is used well is no less important than making sure our highways are used well: If the Beltway were reserved for horses, Washington would not be a very good place to do business.

But our spectrum is not being used well. It's the classic innovator's quandary: We made good decisions many years ago, but those good decisions created powerful incumbents, and in order to make good decisions now, we must somehow unseat the incumbents.

Today, much of the best spectrum is allocated to broadcast television. Decades ago, when 90 percent of Americans received their programming this way, that made sense. Today, when fewer than 10 percent of Americans do, it doesn't.

Meanwhile, mobile broadband is quite clearly the platform of the future - or at least the near future. But we don't have nearly enough spectrum allocated for its use. Unless that changes, the technology will be unable to progress, as more advanced uses will require more bandwidth, or it will have to be rationed, perhaps through extremely high prices that make sure most people can't use it.

The FCC could just yank the spectrum from the channels and hand it to the mobile industry. But it won't. It fears lawsuits and angry calls from lawmakers. And temperamentally, Genachowski himself is a consensus-builder rather than a steamroller.

Instead, the hope is that current owners of spectrum will give it up voluntarily. In exchange, they'd get big sacks of money. If a slice of spectrum is worth billions of dollars to Verizon but only a couple of million to a few aging TV stations - TV stations that have other ways to reach most of those customers - then there should be enough money in this transaction to leave everyone happy.

At least, that's some people's hope. Some advocates want that spectrum - or at least a substantial portion of it - left unlicensed. Rather than using telecom corporations such as Verizon to buy off the current owners of the spectrum, they'd like to see the federal government take some of that spectrum back and preserve it as a public resource for the sort of innovation we can't yet imagine and that the big corporations aren't likely to pioneer - the same as happened with WiFi. But as of yet, that's not the FCC's vision for this. Officials are more worried about the mobile broadband market. They argue (accurately) that they've already made more beachfront spectrum available for unlicensed uses. And although they don't say this clearly, auctioning spectrum to large corporations gives them the money to pay off the current owners. But even so, they can't do that.

"Imagine someone was given property on Fifth Avenue 50 years ago, but they don't use it and can't sell it," says Tim Wu, a law professor at Harvard and author of "The Master Switch." That's the situation that's arisen in the spectrum universe. It's not legal for the FCC to run auctions and hand over some of the proceeds to the old owners. That means the people sitting on the spectrum have little incentive to give it up. For that to change, the FCC needs Congress to pass a law empowering it to compensate current holders of spectrum with proceeds from the sale.

One way - the slightly demagogic way - to underscore the urgency here is to invoke China: Do you think it's letting its information infrastructure stagnate because it's a bureaucratic hassle to get the permits shifted? I rather doubt it.

Of course, we don't want the Chinese system. Democracy is worth some red tape. But if we're going to keep a good political system from becoming an economic handicap, there are going to be a lot of decisions like this one that need to be made. Decisions where we know what we need to do to move the economy forward, but where it's easier to do nothing because there are powerful interests attached to old habits. The problem with having a really good 20th century, as America did, is that you've built up a lot of infrastructure and made a lot of decisions that benefit the industries and innovators of the 20th century. But now we're in the 21st century, and junk won't cut it anymore.

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Monday, January 24, 2011

Making Money From the Internet

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