Alan was using a metaphor to drive a point home – that Flint and Detroit are like our VERSION of a third world country. I understand his message, and I hope it does not blur the point: the business model for the networked society is different than the business model for the industrial society. That increased agility is necessary for a sustainable and scalable business. This is true.

GM is not sustainable nor is it agile. It is responsible (as are we for our reliance) for the partial destruction of Flint.

Now we know better.

Ariel

I am in fact trying to bring the issues to the attention of a wider world and draw the analogy that large scale can leave areas their econmies and their people blighted when the world moves on. Its not to say you are not fighting back, and its not to say that you are making progress, but it is fair to say that your country has not treated you kindly.

I am not Michael Moore, and have done my own research – I also have people close to the ground in Flint and Detroit.

Please let me know what you are doing as I am happy to post about it.

Thanks for posting

Alan Moore

There is a lot of new development and nimbleness still left in this city, and a lot of dedicated people committed to it’s resurrection.

For example, this alleged “third world country” just mustered the support to vote our local farmer’s market the best in the nation – the Chicago Tribune even said ours was better than the one in Chicago! The four colleges here are working to change the face of Flint with new student housing and collaborations on many levels. Two grocery stores are opening downtown to service the new influx of young residents. On top of that, four restaurants have opened in our once beleaguered downtown and our Cultural Center campus rivals that of many bigger cities.

While we may never recreate the days of “Generous Motors” in Flint, we will come out of this in good shape. Don’t believe everything you see in “Roger and Me.” While Michael Moore has an entertaining way of making a point, one must remember that good news doesn’t sell as well as bad news.

1) I don’t think you have to choose between saying that Google’s innovation was its search algorithm or its business model. Getting them to work togeher and at scale is really the success story. Using citations as a way of ranking site relevance was fairly innovative for its time. The business model, which is to provide content to people that interests them alongside classified ads that are meant for people with those interests is straight out of the ndustrial-age newspaper business.

2) What Google doesn’t share is what in part helps it stay the most preferred search engine: its algorithm. Whilst it wants to make all the “world’s” information available to people, it’s careful to hang on to what it considers to be Google’s intellectual property.

(Google thinks that information belongs either to the world or to Google – which I think is what Murdoch is taking issue with).

3) Google’s forays into sharing, particularly YouTube, have not been all that commercially succesful for it especially compared with its transactional, one-to-many classifieds+search offering.

4) Google absolutely needs scale to succeed. It is a scale business. Only seriously big money could ever hope to challenge it.

4a) Its success lies in being able to sell ads in most territories in the world, that’s why there are ‘Googleplexes’ in so many cities in the world.

4b) To be useful, people have to be confident that Google indexes most of the web. Doing that requires a lot, I mean really a lot, of computing power. They are estimated to have more than 800,000 servers around the world in many data centers. Just one of them, in North Carolina, cost over US$600 million to build, and is more than 216 acres. Some estimates are that they own 2% of all the servers in the world. I think this puts your example of a car plant in Detroit into perspective. It would take serious scale to challenge Google, which is why Bing is the only one that’s even beginning to bite.

4c) Google needs scale in terms of numbers of users too. Advertisers buy Google because they can slice and dice their way through most of the world’s internet users and still be left with a sizeable market to sell to. Who are you going to advertise with – the company that reaches 85% of the market several times a day or one that reaches one tenth of that?

sources
found with Bing because I hate Google

http://www.straightupsearch.com/archives/2008/04/google_builds_d.html
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/06/11/JeffDeanOnGoogleInfrastructure.aspx