How Not to Predict Stock Performance

Google hasn’t had a great week on the stock market so far, but it isn’t often that you get to use the words “Google stock” and “kick ’em while they’re down” in the same sentence, so…

I like my own little subtle “inside jokes” a bit too much sometimes. If you’re sharp-eyed you’ll have noticed that on the left-hand margin, down a ways, is an RSS feed featuring the latest news stories which include the phrase, “the next Google.” Yes, I use Google News itself to drive the RSS feed, ha ha.

Short Google

I’d like to go on record with a date-stamp and predict that Bill Gates has begun a successful counter-revolution. I’d bet on MS, not Google. When I visited the Googleplex HQ in 2001, the foosball tables and personal chefs already gave an air of dotcomdom…. the ensuing years and successful innovations at Google notwithstanding, I’d bet corporate rigor and stamina over “Do no evil” every time. And until I see corporate rigor in Google, they still have some flame-out possibility….

In the meantime, we’re keeping a very open mind, on Google Earth (evaluating it alongside ESRI’s competitor ArcGIS Explorer and MS Live MapPoint) and on Google search applicability. There’s a lot of capability driven by metadata-tagging that can’t be done just with search.