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The Economist and Google
By Martin English | September 20, 2007
Some recent artciles in The Economist about google.
More JP Morgan than Bill Gates
Google is often compared to Microsoft…but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people’s money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals. Yes, this applies also to rivals such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. But Google, through the sheer speed with which it accumulates the treasure of information, will be the one to test the limits of what society can tolerate.
It is rare for a company to dominate its industry while claiming not to be motivated by money. Google does. But it has yet to face a crisis.
This idea that we don’t know what companies are made of until they face their first crisis (a slowdown in growth, a collapse in their market, a new competitor that threatens their business) is a really good one to keep in mind.
and an online only story about the Semantic Web
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