The biggest immediate threat to Google’s dominance over web search – and hence the online advertising money machine – is Microsoft’s control over the PC desktop. It’s been clear for some time that Google deeply fears that Microsoft will use the rollout of the new versions of Windows (Vista), Internet Explorer and Office to establish default settings that will lead users to Microsoft’s Live (formerly MSN) search engine rather than Google’s. As I’ve argued before, it’s the fear of the default that underlies Google’s heavy promotion over the past year of the Google Toolbar as well as the Firefox browser, both of which provide ways to wrest control over PC users’ default settings away from Microsoft. Last week, Google took the unusual step of heavily promoting Firefox on its sacrosanct home page – an indication of the stakes involved.

Now, Google appears to be opening a new front in the default war beyond technological competition. Monday’s New York Times features a story by Steve Lohr describing how Google is using its lobbying operation to try to seed governmental concerns about antitrust issues related to Microsoft’s control over default search settings in its browser. Lohr writes:

With a $10 billion advertising market at stake, Google, the fast-rising Internet star, is raising objections to the way that it says Microsoft, the incumbent powerhouse of computing, is wielding control over Internet searching in its new Web browser.

Google, which only recently began beefing up its lobbying efforts in Washington, says it expressed its concerns in recent talks with the Justice Department and the European Commission, both of which have brought previous successful antitrust actions against Microsoft.

Google executive Marissa Mayer tells Lohr, “The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services … We don’t think it’s right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose.” Microsoft counters that the default search setting is easy to change. An executive with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team tells Lohr that “the guiding principle we had is that the user is in control.”

The article provides a clear sense of the power of the default. According to Google estimates, when PC owners have a search box embedded in their browser, they use it for “30 to 50 percent” of their searches. The browser search boxes thus form, writes Lohr, “a crucial gateway to the lucrative and fast-growing market for advertisements that appear next to search results.” My own experience backs this up. I usually use Apple’s Safari browser, which, ironically, has Google as its default setting. I’d say I use it for at least 70 percent of my web searches.

This seems like a bit of a risky move for Google, given its current dominance in internet search. It seems possible that it could come to rue the day that it asked for increased government attention to competition in the search arena. But apparently it sees the threat as large enough to warrant the risk.

UPDATE: Late Sunday, the blog of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team posted a response to the Times story (without actually mentioning the story). “The typical default when users install IE7 on their Windows XP machines,” the post says, “will most likely be their usual search engine. Despite claims from some people around the web, MSN is not ‘The Default.’ The search box in IE7 uses IE6’s AutoSearch setting because we think this setting is the best indication IE has of the user’s preference.”

UPDATE: Peter O’Kelly identifies one of the important subtexts to the story:

I think this complaint also says a lot about Google’s confidence in its customer/brand loyalty – if Google is worried about people dumping it for MSN Search because it’s not worth the extra effort to click twice in IE7 to change the default search setting, perhaps Google fears it really does have a one-click brand loyalty problem.

I wrote about the (re-)commoditization of search last November:

The low switching costs [involved in changing which search engine you use] could turn into a big problem for Google for a simple reason: basic internet search is once again a commodity. Do a search on Google or MSN or Yahoo, and you’ll find little differentiation in the relevance of the results. Yes, if you’re a super-sophisticated searcher, you may be able to point to variations that you think are important, but casual searchers won’t notice any difference – and the vast, vast majority of searchers are casual searchers. There may be another great, proprietary breakthrough in internet search in the future, but for the moment Google has lost its lead.

Defaults have the most power when differences between alternatives are weak.

UPDATE: On a related note, Monday’s Toronto Globe & Mail has an article, by Simon Avery, on Microsoft’s aggressive plans to take on Google in online advertising. Avery quotes a Microsoft executive describing Bill Gates: “Now all he cares about is advertising.”

UPDATE: More of my thoughts can be found in my next post.

Search boxes are extremely valuable real estate, as the recent bidding war to provide search for AOL showed. Google managed to hold on to the AOL account, which provides the search giant with a hefty chunk of its revenues. Today, however, Google lost a big one. Amazon.com quietly switched from using Google’s search engine to using Microsoft’s new Windows Live engine as the provider of results (and, one assumes, search-based ads) for both its A9 search service and its Alexa site-ranking service. As Google has moved deeper into shopping services and book sales, it’s been on a collision course with Amazon. But my guess is that money was probably more important than strategy in this decision. The big question: What did Microsoft pay, and is this part of a larger deal? No word yet from the principals.

UPDATE: Interestingly, in looking at the results page of an A9 search, I just noticed that while the web results say “Search results provided by Windows Live,” the image results still say “Search results enhanced by Google.” A menage a trois?

Managing Editor

Line56

Dear Sir,

You oversee a seemingly professional online technology magazine named Line56. I was intrigued today to see on your home page a link to an article called “Is Web 2.0 Enterprise Ready?,” which happens to be the same title as a recent post I wrote for this blog. I clicked on the link and landed on another page on your site where I found that not only was the title the same as my post’s but that the article was, in fact, the post that I had written. You reprinted on your commercial site, beside advertisements, an article written by me, in its entirety, without my permission. You did not even bother to provide any link back to my site or even to mention the name of my site. Yes, you listed my name as the “source,” but when you click on my name you are directed to a generic Line56 “editorial feedback” form.

I’m just curious. Are you under the impression that copyright laws somehow do not apply to blogs and that you can freely pilfer another person’s writing and republish it on your own site at your pleasure? Are you, in other words, a scoundrel by trade or merely by ignorance?

Awaiting your reply with great interest,

I remain (apparently) your humble servant,

Nicholas Carr

POSTSCRIPT: The site has removed my article.

POSTSCRIPT 2: I have removed the name of the managing editor from this post, as it was appearing near the top of Google searches on his name, which seemed unfair now that many months have gone by.

It’s the new thing: Web 2.0 koans.

Tim O’Reilly offers this “lovely” one from MySQL boss Marten Mickos:

“The ecosystem is the computer, and collaboration is its operating system.”

Paul Kedrosky reports on one from Disney chief Bob Iger:

“Technology is to media companies what refrigeration was to Coca-Cola.”

The secret is to keep them to a single sentence, have them sound portentous and ensure that they almost, but not quite, make sense. Inspired, I’ve come up with a few myself:

“Open source is the cradle, and the baby is participation.”

“The operating system is blue, and a flock of migrating geese are the APIs.”

“Attention is the moat around the castle, and the gesture is the mote in the king’s eye.”

“Syndication is the refrigerator, and Dave Winer is the beer.”

Dear blog reader, you can join in this transcendental fun. Dim the LCD, light a few candles, and contort your body into some inhuman position, preferably involving the placement of your feet behind your ears. Then think deeply, letting the metaphors and the symbols flow.

Please share your best Web 2.0 koan by putting it in a comment to this post. If we achieve a critical mass, we may attain nirvana.

On his blog, Harvard’s Andrew McAfee mulls over some of the barriers to the successful adoption of Web 2.0 collaboration technologies by businesses. He points out that even the most prominent examples of Web 2.0 platforms, such as Wikipedia, are actually produced by a relatively small number of contributors. Many people may consume the product, but only a fraction of those contribute to its production. In addition to the famous “long tail” in demand for information goods, in other words, there’s a long tail of production. As McAfee puts it:

I think there’s also a long tail among people, and it relates not to willingness to consume (i.e. demand) but rather to willingness to produce. In November of 2005, the most recent month for which comprehensive stats are available, Wikipedia had over 850,000 articles in English, and 2.9 million across all languages … This content was generated by fewer than 50,000 contributors in English, and 103,000 total … And even this population is skewed: active English wikipedians (more than 5 contributions in a month) numbered 15,600 last November, and very active (100 or more) numbered only 2,081 …

If companies only get the same fraction of Intranet users to use [Web 2.0] tools, these tools will be roundly and rightly acclaimed as failures. Business leaders have to find ways to increase the ‘ambient percentage’ of internal wikipedians, bloggers, taggers, etc. well beyond what we’ve observed so far on the public Internet. Demonstrating that these tools will increase productivity, decrease workload, and put hours back in the week will certainly help, but I wonder if such demonstrations will be enough.

McAfee makes a critically important point. But I’d go even further. Although wikis and other Web 2.0 platforms for the creation of content are often described in purely egalitarian terms – as the products of communities of equals – that’s just a utopian fantasy. In fact, the quality of the product hinges not just, or even primarily, on the number of contributors. It also hinges on the talent of the contributors – or, more accurately, on the talent of every individual contributor. No matter how vast, a community of mediocrities will never be able to produce anything better than mediocre work. Indeed, I would argue that the talent of the contributors is in the end far more important to quality than is the number of contributors. Put 5,000 smart people to work on a wiki, and they’ll come up with something better than a wiki created by a million numbskulls.

The quality of any entry in Wikipedia, for instance, is ultimately determined not by how many people work on it but by how many talented people work on it. An entry written by a single expert will be better than an entry written by a hundred fools. When you look deeply into Wikipedia, beyond the shiny surface of “community,” you see that the encyclopedia is actually as much, or more, a product of conflict than of collaboration: It’s an endless struggle by a few talented contributors to clean up the mess left by the numbskull horde.

In a business context, the talent of the contributor pool is a particularly critical factor in the success of a Web 2.0 platform – far more important than the raw number of contributors or the ratio of contributors to total employees. As studies of organizational dynamics show, useful knowledge is not disseminated evenly throughout a business. The distribution is clumpy. A relatively few people hold a relatively large portion of the smarts, the expertise, the contacts, the political savvy and so on. Getting those people – the meritocratic elite – to contribute to a collaboration platform is a big challenge facing Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Those people, to speak generally, tend to be the busiest (the most in demand, anyway) and the least likely to have either the time or the interest to suffer the contributions of fools. They also have some very good economic and social reasons not to want to share their knowledge broadly without suitable compensation. As earlier knowledge-management failures have shown, the elite often have the least incentive to get involved, and without them, the project’s doomed.

Moreover, if the elite hold back at the start, the product is likely to be defined at the outset by the contributions of the mediocrities. That’s the kiss of death, because it turns off everyone else immediately. I wish I could say that companies should seek to find ways to both maximize the contributions of the organizational elite and minimize the contributions of the numbskulls, but if the former’s difficult, the latter’s impossible. When it comes to Web 2.0, if you build it, the numbskulls will come.

UPDATE: You knew it had to happen: A blogger has written a response to this post titled, without irony, “The Wisdom of Numbskulls.”

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewd by John Gallant for Network World’s Hot Seat series. Here’s the video.

The $100 rule isn’t the only interesting clause contained in the contract that Google requires publishers to agree to before they can join the company’s AdSense program. There’s also this:

You shall not, and shall not authorize or encourage any third party to … engage in any action or practice that reflects poorly on Google or otherwise disparages or devalues Google’s reputation or goodwill. You acknowledge that any attempted participation or violation of any of the foregoing is a material breach of this Agreement and that we may pursue any and all applicable legal and equitable remedies against You, including an immediate suspension of Your account or termination of this Agreement, and the pursuit of all available civil or criminal remedies.

So before they can run ads from Google, publishers have to agree to refrain from doing anything – like publishing an article, say – that “reflects poorly on Google or otherwise disparages or devalues Google’s reputation or goodwill”? Hmm. Can you imagine the outcry if a mainstream media outlet like the Washington Post agreed not to say bad things about a company in return for advertising dollars? And yet that’s exactly what Google seems to be demanding from bloggers and other online publishers. (Actually, come to think of it, the Washington Post and a lot of other mainstream publishers do run ads from Google on their web sites; I wonder if they agreed to this term or if they were given a different contract.) Yahoo, by the way, doesn’t have such a clause in its contract for its ad-serving network.

The good news is that most bloggers and publishers don’t seem to be paying any attention to this clause and, so far as I know, Google doesn’t seem to be enforcing it. Still, it’s curious that a company whose ostensible mission is to make all the world’s information freely available should be such a control freak when it comes to information about itself.