Some Month Google’s Having, Eh?

I’ll bet Sergey Brin wishes he stayed in bed for May, because he can’t be having much fun.  For a company that is indisputably at the top of the internet food chain right now to suffer blows one after another like this is just stunning to watch.

• WiFi spying – Oops, they didn’t even realize they were sniffing unprotected wifi network activity wherever their Street View cars went.  Only Google could fail to notice a pile of data that large building up.  As far as I can tell, nobody has actually been hurt by this, as no human has actually looked at the data let alone found a use for it.  But this is Google and privacy, and all the apologies and mea culpas in the world aren’t going to stop the investigations and posturing we’ll have to watch throughout the rest of the year.
• Nexus One closure – Google’s attempt to directly target the consumer wireless market is history, though of course Android itself isn’t.  They quite simply misjudged what consumers want and how they buy phones.  You can’t win them all I guess.
• Today’s VP8 codec release – This was supposed to be an exciting, transformative event, but it’s getting some rather negative and immediate responses from pundits who focus on video delivery, who you’d think would be falling over backward for an open source codec and a challenge to the status quo.  Dan Rayburn, Iolo Jones, and Stef van der Ziel all fired off critical reviews of VP8.

So how does this affect those who actually push around the bits?  Not all that much I guess.  But it ought to make it clear that even if Google someday gets into the fiber business in a major way the way rumors predict frequently, it doesn’t mean they will do it intelligently enough to hurt anyone.  I wonder how that 1Gbps-to-the-home project is coming along these days.  Hah, maybe that’s next week’s news.

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Categories: Internet Traffic · Video · Wireless