In my mind it begins with the image of Steve Ballmer heaving chairs, which is either a myth or too true to type. Then there are those ads that now maintain the a desirable PC is all about size of RAM, Hard Drive et al. Now there is the new ad for IE 8.0 and it reeks of fear-mongering to a ditzy female PC user who appears stupid and half mad.
Is it just me or does MSFT today act like GM did for the last 50some years!
There are companies that pay attention to unproductive methods/attitudes and remake their image, like IBM. And others that do the right thing naturally ala Apple and Google.
According to Wikipedia’s entry on the subject, “the term has no single definition about which the majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree.” But in practice, Wikipedia’s standard for inclusion has become its de facto standard for truth, and since Wikipedia is the most widely read online reference on the planet, it’s the standard of truth that most people are implicitly using when they type a search term into Google or Yahoo. On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject.
That standard is simple: something is true if it was published in a newspaper article, a magazine or journal, or a book published by a university press–or if it appeared on Dr. Who.
Google seems to have iconic features in more ways than one. It is a prominent element in most browsers, the primary web research tool, a top stock, offering a desktop alternative, a brand that is ubiquitous and as recognizable as Apple and the Golden Arches.
My daily ration of reading is heavily weighted by all that I read on the Internet, the news, blogs, book reviews, history stuff and so on and on. I used to read at least one hard copy newspaper and magazine every day or other day at least.
How has my googleizing and web reading affected me? I know more about the world and about myself in some very specific ways. So I say to Mr. Carr, in the every day sense I have been made unstoopid by Google and its context the web and blog spheres. I spend longer periods almost every day thinking and musing here about a variety of issues, events and visual experiences. It’s a better life IMHO!
We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!
is not likely now to say the least. If you are interested go to this link!
Here is an excerpt from that essay from “The Edge”
Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.
The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.
Introduction
According to Chris Anderson, we are at “the end of science”, that is, science as we know it.” The quest for knowledge used to begin with grand theories. Now it begins with massive amounts of data. Welcome to the Petabyte Age.”
“At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later.”
In response to Anderson’s essay, Stewart Brand notes that:
Digital humanity apparently crossed from one watershed to another over the last few years. Now we are noticing. Noticing usually helps. We’ll converge on one or two names for the new watershed and watch what induction tells us about how it works and what it’s good for.
The “crossing” that Anderson has named in his essay, has been developing in science for several years and in the Edge community in particular.
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