Google: Prince or Grind?
There's a fun discussion here about David Brooks' column today in the NYTimes, in which he distinguishes between Princes -- the investment banker types, the fee-takers -- and the Grinds -- the entrepreneurial risk-takers, the small businessmen. Ricochet member Duane Oyen makes a finer distinction:
It isn't necessarily big vs. little or new vs. old, though there are elements of both. It is in many ways "people who make stuff" vs. "people who skim cream off the top while they shift around what other people make".
The Wall Street bigs are the original self-serving skimmers (especially next to an "angel investor"). Amazon and Apple (and Asus in Taiwan) create/produce things. Government is the ultimate skimmer. GE is sliding, under Immelt with his cronyism and carbon credit dreams, toward skim rather than create. Call Immelt a "moribund capitalist", compared with Welch.
And the Peter chimes in with this anecdote:
My friend Peter Thiel made this point one day when I made the mistake of breezily referring to high tech companies such as Microsoft as entities that persistently unsettle the status quo. Peter replied that, having failed to introduce any important new technology in years, Microsoft was now, in effect, a marketing company, devoted to milking its operating system and Office suite for cash for as long as it could. "Microsoft is the status quo."
Which prompted this crucial question from Ricochet member Trace Urdan:
Microsoft is too easy Peter. Let's try a harder one. Google: prince or grind?
My vote? Prince.
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Jun '10
Re: Google: Prince or Grind?
Will this conversation help explain why my investments in giants like Coleco and WordPerfect didn't work out?
May '10
Re: Google: Prince or Grind?
My vote is "prince" as well- of all the PC slimeballs out there these days.... my daughter prefers Baidu, but I can't read Mandarin.
Yahoo is the grind, and Bing is the aspiring prince. I tend to use Scroogle's scraper most of the time to get an actual clean response.
What I really wish is that a Mozilla-type open source group would create a useful search engine of Google-type capability (the Firefox of search engines), but without harvesting names, taking histories and cookies, and constantly pushing the links of those who pay the most.
Re: Google: Prince or Grind?
I'll take a stab at Trace's challenge--but only if Trace, who clearly knows his way around the worlds of finance and technology, replies with an answer of his own.
I'd establish a "prince/grind" spectrum, with Microsoft all the way over at the "prince" end, and, to keep this within the high tech family, Apple all the way over at "grind." Steve Jobs refuses to settle in and milk the company, insisting on one destabilizing new product after another. The iPhone overthrew everything we thought we understood about cellphones. Now the iPad has wounded the Kindle, probably mortally, while transforming the way every publisher I know (okay; I know two) thinks about delivering the news.
If Microsoft represents a 1 and Apple a 10, I'd place Google at about a 3. Google has indeed introduced new products, as witness, to name one, the Chrome operating system. But is it really using these products to build new businesses? Or just to play mind games with its competitors? Google's only real business--at least for now--is still selling ads, which gives it a big stake in the status quo.
Trace?
Re: Google: Prince or Grind?
Google's new China strategy seems pretty Princely to me. Long ago seem the days of the Microsoft antitrust suit. The best insight in Brooks' piece, it seems to me, is slightly latent: the Princes are quasi-political actors because so much of their success depends on managing relationships in and out of government. And this quasi-political management is swallowing up or superceding regular or real politics. That's the real story, here -- a system which rewards those who struggle to be princes and punishes those who grind it out more independently. It's absolutely no surprise -- and a bloody shame -- that we're turning small business owners into lobbyists.
Edited on Jul 13, 2010 at 11:58amMay '10
Re: Google: Prince or Grind?
Can one be a virtuous grind and still fall prey to flattery? Or does that make me a hapless prince?
Ah well, since the gist of my post was to attempt to discredit the rubric itself, I'd posit that in terms of creation -- Google has been as productive as any tech company, mastering algorithms for search that took the Internet to a whole new place in terms of its usefulness.
As a much larger company its innovation in the advertising market has been equally profound, as we discovered last week when Ricochet became the mattress channel momentarily for the Robinson family. Now we can argue the moral good of advertising I suppose, but the transfer of product information is a fundamental tenet of the capitalist system. Its introduction of free and collaborative software into the cloud has sparked a creative destruction process that could ultimately take down Microsoft.
Today as the tech acquirer of choice Google has encouraged thousands of garage entrepreneurs to innovate and invent in the hope of gaining its notice.
Has Google become Washington-Hollywood cretinous in success? I suppose, but this has happened in spite of its obligation to shareholders, not because of it.
Re: Google: Prince or Grind?
Gee, Trace, but you know a lot. I hereby dub you "Prince Trace," and, pace our conversation here, I mean that in the nicest possible way.
May '10
Re: Google: Prince or Grind?
Thx Peter. I think Ricochet needs a ROTFL button. "Like" seems insufficient most days.
May '10
Re: Google: Prince or Grind?
Last time I looked, Google was still losing money on everything they have built or bought except for the search engine.
My mild distaste is centered on the fact that they alone refuse to commemorate American special days (with customized logo treatments), while honoring every enviro-lefty wacko event on earth.