Steven Mooner Usher

Google CEO Eric Schmidt didn’t say anything as he flanked President-elect Barack Obama during his first post-election press conference. He didn’t have to.

The image alone of Schmidt standing elbow-to-elbow with Obama’s top economic thinkers was enough to send shivers up the spine of Google’s competitors.

“This terrifies Microsoft,” said a Democratic lobbyist familiar with the industry. “There’s a reason why people are scared to death of Google.”

Last Friday’s press conference Friday came just two days after Google threw in the towel on an attempted Internet advertising partnership with Yahoo, the older, but struggling Web company. Google said that the prospect of an antitrust lawsuit from the Justice Department was the key deal breaker. Yahoo, which needed the deal more than Google, had said it was willing to fight the government, but Google didn’t have the stomach for a protracted legal battle.

So an open question for Google is whether the search-engine giant’s newfound closeness with the Democratic president-elect will give the company the muscle it needs to win disputes with the government over deals such as the Yahoo partnership.

Google says that Schmidt was acting on his own, and his politics don’t reflect the company’s official stance.

“Eric’s endorsement of Senator Obama was a personal matter, and as a company Google was neutral in the campaign,” said Adam Kovacevich, Google’s senior manager of global communications and public affairs. “We look forward to working with the new administration and congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle to keep the Internet open and to promote economic growth.”

Obama’s transition team declined comment.

Some insiders, though, say Schmidt is inevitably identified with the company he leads. And they say that could benefit Google, not on the big decisions in Washington, but on the accumulation of smaller, less-visible matters. “A lot of decisions are made in the gray areas and at the low levels,’ explained the Democratic lobbyist.

“From the staff attorney all the way up the line, everybody now knows that Google is close to Obama,” the lobbyist said. And that could subtly affect the policy playing field in Google’s favor.

Beyond the perennial antitrust battles, Google has a host of other issues pending in Washington, from broadband access and net neutrality to privacy rights to patent reform and copyright policy.
And it hasn’t gone unnoticed in the lobbying community that Google has been quietly upping its participation in the Washington scene for nearly a year.

Not only was Google’s Schmidt on the campaign trail and on Obama’s economic advisory committee, but he also assumed the role of chairman of the influential New America Foundation early this year. Google didn’t donate money as a company, but Schmidt wrote a personal check of $1 million, single handedly financing a healthy portion of the foundation’s $12.9 million annual budget.

The New America Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy think tank, will clearly be at the center of the new administration’s thinking on economic issues: Schmidt and two other of its board members were among the 17 influential economic thinkers who stood behind Obama Friday.

“We’re looking forward to having more friends in the next administration,” said New America Foundation Vice President Rachel White. “But as an independent foundation, the chances are good that we’ll swim against the stream of some of the policies that the Obama administration puts forward.”

Anticipating the problems that can come from having prominent people with multiple agendas serving on the foundation’s board of directors, New America drew up a conflict of interest policy in June, saying, in part: “New America’s conflict of interest policy is not designed to eliminate or exclude relationships and activities that might create a duality of interest, but rather to encourage transparency and careful deliberation in those cases where conflicts or perceived conflicts may arise.” Source Unknown.

So, I haven’t posted for a long time, 19 days in fact, and there is a very simple reason for that, a lack of motivation. When i first set this blog up I foresaw me making daily contributions about all kind of interesting and crazy subjects, but frankly that just hasn’t transpired.

Without having a designated field about which to write, a designated field that was also a passion of mine, then anything I put up here would hold no merit, no interest, and no relevance, so its become apparent that I need to center the blog in on a subject close to my heart, music.

The basic plan at this early stage is to focus it on reviews of local bands or artists in the Somerset area, post details/reviews of their shows, do my own band bio’s, provide contact information etc, and just try and give the little guy a little lift. I will back this up with some reviews of other great bands, from any place or time, most likely restricted to bands that I personally love, and hopefully you do/will too.

For an idea of what to expect, see my post regarding Ryan Inglis, a local musician who’s working towards a record deal, and keep your ears posted if you already haven’t for bands similar to Far, New End Original, The Kinks, Dry Kill Logic, The Dismemberment Plan, Reuben, Rainer Maria, At The Drive-In, De Facto, Arms Bend Back, Sebadoh, and many many others, which I may list at a later date so you know better what to expect from the site, and to decide if it’s something you care to join in with.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that the site will still see posts relevant to my work and other passion, technology. A popular post from my archive, the Google Chrome Review is probably a good snap-shot of the flavour of the technology orientated material you will see here. Coming soon will be a full browser review, pitting the new boys against  each other in some of the key criteria, following the release of Mozilla’s Firefox 3 and Google Chrome in quick succession.

I think that’s pretty much it, I’m off to enjoy some more music (and technology!).

Anyone that uses Google, (the qualifier for this is the fact you are human) will have noticed that beneath that iconic search bar is a new link, directing you to Google Chrome, a Google web browser that as with all things Google, comes with a hype that could perhaps be hugely unmerited.

Before we get to the ins and outs of its functionality, appearance etc, let’s just take a look at the history of the web browser, and why Google would take this route.

The web browser was really born in the late 1980’s, when a variety of technologies, most famous of course the WorldWideWeb, laid the foundation for the first web browser, which brought together a variety of existing and new software and hardware technologies. Web browsers communicate with Web servers primarily using HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) to fetch webpages, which are located by means of a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). In simple terms, they interpret the information that webmasters want you to see, and present it to you in the form of a webpage.

Historically, Microsofts’ Internet Explorer has dominated the market, and currently still holds approximately 75% market share, Mozillas’ Firefox pulls an impressive 20%, and the rest divided between the likes of Safari, K-Meleon, Flock, Konqueror, and Opera.

The market is packed with perfectly capable alternatives…ok, perhaps perfect capable is stretching their achievements, but there are many variations out there that offer you slightly different takes on the idea, and personally Firefox is my browser of choice, but thats largely due to the fact it is not IE.

So why a browser? Well, Google have a suite of Applications, Programs and Indentures (API’s), most notably Google Maps, Android, Google Earth, and Gears, in addition of course to their search services. Could Google be aiming to unify their API’s with Chrome? This is an opinion I’ve seen and heard touted about the internet, but I feel there is a far bigger picture here.

Google Chrome may appear to have its teeth cut for a battle with Internet Explorer, but the Microsoft product that Google is ultimately setting its itself up to destroy is the Windows operating system. In reality, the search titan hopes that its browser, in the short term, will simply make it easier for businesses to deploy their online applications.

Anyway, that’s one for the future, right now we have the issue of where Google Chrome fits in to the current landscape, and my suggestion is that we tuck it discreetly behind a bush and forget about it for the foreseeable future. With it being Google, that may prove to be more difficult than it should be, but in the core elements of its functionality it offers nothing new, nothing exciting, and certainly nothing to challenge Firefox for my attention.

Google’s first major publicity of Chrome came in the form of a 38-page comic that resembled the in-flight instructions of a plane more than it did the release of a major weapon in Google’s considerable armoury. Suffice to say Marvel will sleep easy. The sedate nature of its release suggests Google really aren’t all that bothered about the success of this project, at least not in the near future, and were really just hoping for a little bit of the limelight following Yahoo’s protracted kissing and cuddling with Microsoft before their acrimonious fall-out and subsequent fisticuffs and chest-pumping. Google love a headline, if they were a film star they’d surely become Scientologists and marry some failed actress from Dawsons Creek, but where they normally maneuver that attention well, here I feel they fail on the basic principle of the product letting them down.

They have introduced something called an Omnibox, which is just the search bar wearing a tutu, and fails miserably as a nonpartisan addition to the browser. People have the option with most other browsers of selecting home page etc, but this bar doubles as a search engine on … you’ve guessed it, Google. The merging of the address bar and search bar gives Google too much control over navigation. It separates companies and website operators from their website addresses and brands. Companies spend heavily to establish and maintain brands. Google has just imposed itself between consumers and businesses. Direct navigation has now become proprietary search, whereby Google uses its discretion to filter out web addresses and domains that it deems less relevant. I object heavily to this and see it as no less than bullying, so for this alone I have boycotted the browser, but more poignantly, they have thus far failed to release a Beta version for the Mac. As a Mac user i find this rather insulting, and as an opponent of Microsoft and every filthy moral they stand for I am infuriated.

I shall leave it at this: as a writer/consumer this story is fun, it sometimes even shakes hands with endearment, but as an employee of a web development company, and having test-driven it on a PC, I am more excited by the recession thats’ somewhat fallaciously drowning the spirit of a perpetually melancholic UK. Chrome will not affect things for my employers within the next 3 years at least, and I predict that it probably never will.

I recently wrote about Advanced Web Ranking, and the issues faced with that, but it transpires that Google has blocked all ranking software available for SEO’s and webmasters. Google is successful at presenting information to the world almost purely because that information has been presented to them, and by who? SEO’s of course. If it weren’t for us we’d have titles like “home”, and alt tags missing, which, although they can get abused at times, are still providing much needed information to the blind community. We use these softwares to measure how successful we are presenting our clients web-pages, and we require them to provide proof of our efforts.

Google has put itself in a position of authority, and is operating an intentional maneuver to secure more PPC business. I had never viewed it that way until my boss brought this to my attention this morning, and how very right he seems now. Google shouldn’t necessarily embrace SEO, but they are abusing their position as the worlds number one search engine and manipulating businesses to part with their cash in their on-going pursuit of becoming the internets China. Google and SEO need to be like two old band members that just tolerate each other for the greater good, occasionally we’ll bicker and we may even exchange the odd blow, but we’ll still stick together and maybe even swap Christmas cards, but right now Google has an AK47 pressed right between our eyes and they’re not afraid to pull a trigger or two.