“One of the interesting (though increasingly tedious) parts about being a long-term technology analyst is seeing the same mistakes made over and over again. A young upstart company that is doing very well looks at a more mature firm and figures they can do it better — without first understanding what it is that made the older firm successful.
In the current case it is Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), which I’m increasingly seeing as a company that has set its mind on spectacular failure. The area in question: EMC (NYSE: EMC) and the concept of cloud computing, and whether it should be public or private. The irony is that Google is probably the most private company in technology at the moment — the firm once threatened to blacklist CNET for using Google’s own search engine to collect information on its CEO.
The reality appears to be that Google itself wouldn’t use a public cloud service unless it was from Google, which kind of makes it a private cloud for them, doesn’t it? In the enterprise space we have a term called Walking the Talk. I’m convinced that at Google the terms Walk and Talk haven’t even met, let alone had any relationship with one another.
This gives me long moments where I wonder if Google even has a mirror. They are emerging as the technology equivalent of Anakin Skywalker who starts out with the concept of fighting an evil Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and appears to be ending up as some kind of super Darth Vader.
But let’s focus on why this trend repeats, looking at some of Google’s mistakes. I’ll close with observations from EMC World this week.”
