Google vs Microsoft II

There have been many informative follow-ups to the Rubin speech mentioned here 2 days ago. Surely the most insightful analysis comes from Danny Sullivan. If one follows some of the links in his posting one can see how amazingly thorough Danny is. The bravest posting was mildly critical of Microsoft from the Microsoft-employed blogger Don Dodge. Tim O'Reilly speaks eloquently in Google's defence. He usually does on Book Search. So does Lawrence Lessig. Andrew Grabois's follow-through in the O'Reilly posting, comments on the spuriously inflated percentage of orphan copyrights, seems to reduce the force of O'Reilly and Lessig's argument. The Grabois points took me over to the PersonaNonData blog, for Michael Cairns's own comments. The pnd blog also alerted me to the mournful post from Peter Brantley. That is the contribution that would most worry me if I were the Google Book Search product manager (eek!). But today's PaidContent note on Google's Chinese library efforts leads one to the conclusion that Google is now so far in, it just has to get it right.

Google surely needs to settle with the publishers, listen to its friendly critics in the library community and work with other players in the digital book space. That is the only way to get it right and the only way to

organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful

Whenever Google plans a new information service, someone in the Googleplex should intone 100 times that it is the world's information, not Google's. Google is great and it needs to stay that way.