If Google Executives were Presidential Candidates…

Sometimes tech executives skate away with hubris (look up Larry Ellison), but more often they run the risk of their words coming back to haunt them. 

Just a little example this week – what a difference a day makes, from Tuesday to Wednesday. I’m sympathetic to politicians and executives who put their words on the line in public, opening themselves to the hazard of after-the-fact Monday morning quarterbacks.   But this is an interesting case with lessons for cloud computing…

Dateline: Tuesday August 5

Dave Girouard, president of Google’s Enterprise unit, was energetically promoting Google Apps at the Pacific Crest Technology Leadership Forum, quoted by TechCrunch and PC Retail Mag:

How to Surf the Multilingual Web

Fact: According to an official press release issued yesterday by a Chinese-government-related organization, “1,500 translators and scholars from 76 countries and regions attended the opening ceremony of the eighteenth International Federation of Translators (FIT for “Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs”) World Congress today at the Shanghai International Convention Center. The theme of the congress is translation and cultural diversity.”

Analysis:  Sure, you’re tempted to scoff at these carbon-based units and their old-fashioned “human translation skills”  – because you  like technology so much – but in the realm of language translation, computers are still lagging behind. There’s a long-running debate over the promise of “machine translation” (MT), as a Wikipedia entry argues:

A-SpaceX, Google, and Virtual Tuesday

Yesterday I had a “virtual world vibe” going.  At 5:30 a.m. when my dog Jack woke me up offering to take me for a walk, the first thing I noticed on my mobile was a series of tweets from Chris Rasmussen, NGA’s social software guru, posted the night before.  Twitter is interesting for a lot of reasons, but one is the ability to snatch asynchronous stream-of-consciousness statements, from strangers and friends alike, as they pass by in the microblogosphere conversation.

Chris went on a tear about Second Life, with several hilarious observations and comments within the space of an hour, so here are several from his public Twitter feed: