What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [89]
Even if we did not have such creative ambitions, Google would still provide no end of services in our personal computing clouds. It does that already with Gmail—the best webmail and best spam-fighter out there; Google Docs—free and collaborative word-processing and spreadsheets; Google Calendar; Google Maps; Google Apps. If Google were my local cable and phone company, I’d expect it to provide the means for me and my neighbors to join groups and share information (which is what local newspapers should be doing as well). My neighborhood and town should be searchable. Google has started playing in the local arena with maps, news, and ads, but imagine when Google becomes truly local and I get a version of it and its services tailored to my area, my office, even my family and house.
GT&T would be open. Gone soon will be the days when a company can make its money by telling customers what they cannot do, as cable companies long have done (you can’t upload that much; you can’t watch the shows you’ve already bought without paying extra for our on-demand service; you can’t put as many TVs in your home as you want without paying more; you can’t watch a TV without adding our cable box; you can’t buy just the channels you want but instead have to buy overpriced bundles; you can’t get a time when our technician will actually show up…). Google knows that the more we use the internet, the better off it—and its hypothetical cable and phone company—would be.
I think GT&T would give us portability: Just as I can get my email anywhere on any device thanks to Gmail, I should be able to get the video programming I paid for in any room of the house or even in a hotel room across the country—without the need for cable boxes, TiVos, or Sling-boxes. My inability to do this today isn’t fully the fault of the cable company; it’s the result of archaic notions of copyright protection designed for outmoded technology. Studios and networks have argued that it would be a copyright violation if the cable company kept a copy of a movie I’d bought on its server so I could get it from anywhere. But there’s hope this practice will change after an appeals court decided in 2008 that remote storage is not a violation. The other barrier to portability is hardware. Cable companies are in the business of renting cable boxes to us, thus amortizing their cost and giving them control. Cable companies don’t see how renting boxes limits them, adding to their capital outlay, delaying technical improvements, and reducing our use of their service. GT&T would put forward open standards for everyone who makes TVs or video recorders, eliminating boxes and enabling anything to plug into the network, as on the internet. Google followed that model of openness—increasing use and utility—when it released its open-source browser, Chrome. There is hope on the hardware front as consumer-electronics and cable companies have at long last agreed to allow some integration of devices.
Google would understand that in a larger network of content and information, its opportunity would be to help us find what we want. It would provide a guide to cable as it provides a guide to the world’s information. GT&T would become the new TV Guide and the new TiVo mixed in with a search engine and a social network. Where would it get that guide information? Where Google gets it now: from us, from the crowd. We’d all be networks, recommending shows to each other, no longer caged by the taste and schedules of a few networks. We’d act as a mass of niches, not a mass. No doubt Google would analyze data about our actions and taste and feed