Business Tech

Google claims more than 2 million businesses and 20 million people have switched to Google Apps, a movement the company is touting through its expanding "Gone Google" marketing program.

Google's official blog on Monday put in a plug for the ongoing flow of companies that have adopted its services, including not just Google Apps, but also the Postini spam filtering and Google's Enterprise Search Appliance.

In August, Google asked customers to tweet the benefits of using its online apps and services, and now the company has gathered together those tweets in its GoogleAtWork Twitter page.

Through its "Gone Google" marketing campaign, the company has been able to relate the stories of corporate customers who have switched to Google Apps and "no longer have to deal with the hassles of managing e-mail servers or rolling out software updates."

The "Gone Google" campaign has also included billboard advertising in high-traffic spots like airports and train stations. Pleased with the results, Google said it's expanding the campaign to other countries, including the U.K., France, Canada, Japan, Australia, and Singapore.

With a portfolio that includes Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Calendar, Google Apps has been adopted by more large businesses in need of software that costs less and is easier to maintain. Converts to Google Apps include Motorola with 20,000 users, Genentech with 16,300 users, and Valeo with 30,000 users.

Google has also been more creative in nudging businesses toward its services. As one example, the company's Apps Sync for Outlook plug-in lets users keep Outlook but move away from Microsoft Exchange.

Even Google's response toward advertising has been evolving. In the past, the company has typically avoided promoting its own services, relying more on word of mouth to grow its search and ad businesses. But it's recently become less shy about tapping into the ad market, using TV, billboards, and other unique arenas to tout Google Apps and its Chrome browser.

Netbooks continue to soar in sales at the expense of the venerable notebook, according to a new report from DisplaySearch.

Revenues for Netbooks, or mini-notebooks, rose to $3 billion in the second quarter of the year, a leap of 264 percent over the second quarter of 2008, according to the new "Quarterly Notebook PC Shipment and Forecast Report" released Thursday. With those gains, Netbooks now enjoy an 11.7 percent share of the portable PC market.

(Credit: DisplaySearch)

Though traditional notebooks still command an 89 percent slice of the market, their second quarter sales fell to $23.2 billion, a 14 percent decline from the second quarter of 2008.

Measuring 2009's second quarter against the prior year's quarter, sales fell in all subcategories of the portable PC market, including ultraportables and desktop replacements, the report noted. PCs in the 13-inch to 16-inch range managed to eke out a gain, but only measured against the first quarter of 2009.

The low prices of Netbooks appeal to consumers looking for a second PC and to those in emerging markets who don't need the rich and costly features of a large laptop. The market has also been buoyed by cable and telecommunications providers who have doled out Netbooks to customers who sign up for lengthy contracts.

As finalization of a Microsoft-Yahoo search deal reportedly nears, activist investor Carl Icahn--who played a key role in trying to broker a broader partnership between the companies last year--is speaking out in favor of such an agreement.

"I've been a strong advocate of getting a search deal done with Microsoft," Icahn, who owns about 5 percent of Yahoo and sits on its board, told Reuters in a phone interview Friday. "It would enhance value if a deal got done, because of the synergies involved."

According to an All Things Digital report late Thursday, several top Microsoft players--including online executives Yusuf Mehdi, Satya Nadella, and Qi Lu--are in Silicon Valley to try to finalize a search deal with Yahoo.

The report says the two sides are "down to the short strokes" after years of closely watched on-again, off-again talks. A deal could come within a week, All Things Digital said.

Icahn, for his part, wouldn't comment on where the latest supposed negotiations between Yahoo and Microsoft stand, according to Reuters. Icahn was a central figure in Microsoft's highly scrutinized $47.5 billion takeover bid for Yahoo, which fell apart last November.

During the negotiations, he launched a proxy fight in a bid to take over Yahoo's board. Among his wishes was that then-CEO Jerry Yang step down. The company and Icahn eventually reached an agreement that got him a seat on the board, and the number of seats was expanded, with Yahoo appointing two new members from Icahn's slate of candidates.

Since the full-out acquisition fell through, both Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and current Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz have indicated they are open to some sort of a search deal.

As my CNET News colleague Ina Fried pointed out, with Microsoft's Bing getting some good reviews and Microsoft having billions in cash on hand, the pieces would seem to be in place if both sides have the will to make it happen.

Bing may be catching on as a new search engine, but it has yet to generate growth in ad dollars for Microsoft, according to a report released Tuesday.

Microsoft's share of search engine ad spending for the second quarter stayed flat at less than 6 percent, according to the report by research firm SearchIgnite. That's the same level it's been for the past several years.

"Microsoft appears to be focusing its efforts on driving consumer interest and capturing increased search query share," said Roger Barnette, president of SearchIgnite. "We have not yet seen this translate into more paid search advertising dollars for Microsoft, although typically consumer adoption precedes advertiser adoption."

Meanwhile, Microsoft's one-time acquisition target Yahoo lost ground in the second quarter, with only 17 percent of the market. But top dog Google continued to rise, grabbing a 77 percent market share for search engine ad spending.

(Credit: SearchIgnite)

However, don't count out Bing just yet. The report noted that research groups have tracked Bing's share of the search query market growing since its launch last month. Ad spending typically lags behind search queries. If consumer interest continues, Bing could enjoy a boost in ad dollars for the third quarter.

Overall, the market for search engine ad spending flourished in the second quarter. The report noted that retail firms spent 36 percent more on paid search engines than in 2008's second quarter. Spending just for the month of June shot up 55 percent from June 2008.

(Credit: SearchIgnite)

"We've seen very strong paid search spend from retailers for the last several quarters," said Barnette, "a trend that can be attributed to an increase in retailers' promotional activity as they turn to heavy discounting and sales to drive purchases."

For this latest report, SearchIgnite tracked 500 marketers using Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing for the quarter ended June 30.

Demand for Netbooks has been hot and is likely to get hotter, as sales of their big brother, notebooks, are set to remain steady this year.

Netbooks are projected to grab a 20 percent share of the worldwide market for 2009, according to a report released Monday by researcher DisplaySearch, an NPD Group subsidiary. Consumers are expected to scoop up almost 33 million Netbooks this year, marking a sales gain of close to 100 percent from last year's 16 million.

But notebook sales are set to be flat this year, with 129 million units shipping, virtually the same as in 2008, according to DisplaySearch's Quarterly Notebook PC Shipment and Forecast Report. This would make the first year ever that the notebook market showed no sales growth. DisplaySearch defines notebooks as laptop computers with screens measuring 12.1 inches or larger.

By region, this year's Netbook sales are forecast to jump 260 percent in China, 137 percent in North America, and 88 percent in Latin America.

(Credit: DisplaySearch)

The affordability of Netbooks, which typically have fewer features and are less powerful than notebooks, has fostered their growth around the world, the report noted. Last year, 45 percent of Netbooks were shipped to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), winning a larger market share over notebooks.

The availability of Netbooks has also boosted sales, DisplaySearch said. Telecommunications providers such as AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon Communications have marketed low-cost, subsidized Netbooks to their customers.

The notebook market itself has been hurt by reduced IT spending, stalling purchases on new units. If Windows 7 takes off at the same time the economy revives, notebook demand among enterprises could shoot up next year.

Notebooks also have carved out a large chunk of the global portable PC market, and they are not being replaced by Netbooks at this point.

"It is clear that buyers want a lightweight device but that they also want a bigger display," said John F. Jacobs, director of notebook market research at DisplaySearch and author of the report. "While (Netbooks) have certainly created a new market, our research indicates that they are predominantly used as secondary PCs by consumers and are not replacing notebooks."

Google's latest internal corporate search tool, the Google Search Appliance 6.0.

(Credit: Google)

Google sells hardware, too, and announced Tuesday that its Google Search Appliance can now find documents by the billions.

Google Search Appliance 6.0 (GSA) is the company's product for helping enterprises locate and manage the reams of internal corporate data that doesn't get indexed by Google's search bots, but which needs to be found by managers and employees. The latest version is all about scaling, or the ability to link dozens of these appliances to allow even the biggest companies to search their networks for presentations, spreadsheets, and other documents.

There are two hardware models that are capable of searching different numbers of documents: the high-end GB-9009 can search 30 million documents by itself and reach into the billions if a company links several appliances together. The appliances are built on the Dell's PowerEdge R710 design.

Google charges businesses a licensing fee for several years of internal document searching, based on the number of documents inside their organization.

TV makers worldwide saw their revenues slide 12 percent in the last year, according to a report set to be released Tuesday by DisplaySearch.

A total of 43.3 million TVs were sold worldwide in the first quarter of this year, a 6 percent drop compared to the same quarter a year ago, and prices dropped 6 percent, too, according to the Quarterly Global TV Shipment and Forecast Report.

Even Samsung, which collects more money in its coffers for TVs than any company in the world for the past 13 straight quarters, saw its revenues drop 8 percent since the same time last year. But it still held its lead in the industry, maintaining a 21.5 percent share of dollars spent on TVs worldwide.

The biggest shake-up in the last quarter came from LG Electronics which, at 2 percent growth from a year ago, was the only one of the top five manufacturers to see an uptick in revenues. It was able to leapfrog Sony into second place, claiming 13.3 percent of the TV market. Sony garnered 13.1 percent, followed by Sharp with 7.2 percent, and Panasonic with 6.1 percent.

Panasonic appeared to have the most trouble in the most recent quarter. It saw revenues from TV sales drop 22 percent over the last year.

These kinds of slumping progress reports from all sectors of the technology industry have become practically commonplace. Declining revenues are particularly a problem in consumer electronics as shoppers are finding themselves with less discretionary income.

One of my concerns with the public launch of Wolfram Alpha later this month is withstanding the crushing load the Internet can impose. But Wolfram Research revealed Tuesday it's building the service on the world's 66th-fastest supercomputer.

The machine, built out of Dell hardware by a company called R Systems, can sustain performance of 39.6 trillion mathematical operations per second, according to the November 2008 list of the top 500 supercomputers. That muscle will come in handy for Alpha, which I think of as a combination of a graphing calculator, search engine, and reference library that not only supplies some answers to factual, data-intensive questions but also does math in the process.

"There is no way to know exactly how much traffic to expect, especially during the initial period immediately following our launch, but we're working hard to put reasonable capacity in place. Will we have enough computing power to provide computable knowledge for everyone who visits? We hope so," Wolfram Research said on its Wolfram Alpha blog Tuesday

The system, called R Smarr, has 4,608 processor cores using 576 quad-core "Harpertown" Xeon machines, 65,536GB of memory, and high-speed InfiniBand data-transfer connections, according to the Top500 site and a Dell case study on the system (PDF). It also uses both the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows HPC Server operating systems, according to the Dell paper.

Alpha requests will be served from five co-location facilities, Wolfram Research said. There actually are two supercomputers in the project, with nearly 10,000 processor cores total and hundreds of terabytes of hard drives.

R Smarr doesn't use ordinary Dell servers. Instead, custom-made machines were ordered through Dell's Data Center Solutions division. "We evaluated the standard Dell PowerEdge servers, but at the time, those systems did not offer a server board that could deliver the high memory bandwidth necessary for our client," said Brian Kucic, R Systems' vice president of business development, in the Dell paper. Kucic.

Some of what goes on behind the Alpha covers is use of Wolfram Research's Mathematica software, which can perform a wide variety of mathematical and graphical operations. A massive number-crunching utility freely available over the Web sounds like a recipe for disaster, but in my tour of a preview version of Wolfram Alpha, I encountered a timeout limit of about 5 seconds in searching all occurrences of a particular sequence in the human genome, so it looks to me like Wolfram has the ability to throttle usage.

Updates at 9:10 a.m., 9:45 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 10:40 a.m., 11:25 a.m., and 12:15 p.m. PST: Google's and StopBadware.org's numerous responses added. Rewrites have been made throughout to sum up the issue.

For about an hour on Saturday morning, Google listed every site on the Internet as malware.

After the initial problem was fixed, it took a couple of hours to iron out who actually was to blame--Google or a nonprofit known as StopBadware.org.

Here are Google's results for a search on 'Google' early Saturday morning. Click on image for a larger view.

(Credit: Google, via Friendlybit.com)

TechCrunch and CNET reported around 7 a.m. PST that every site found via Google search was flagged with this message: "This site may harm your computer." As part of Google's malware protection, clicking on a flagged site's link would pull up an additional warning. Although a link could simply be cut and paste, Google's warning was unnerving enough to keep some people from pushing their luck.

Twitter was awash in the news, with thousands of people posting about their kindred experiences on Google search.

In a blog posting just after 9 a.m. PST, Marissa Mayer, Google vice president of search products & user experience, attributed the problem to "human error" and to a URL list provided by StopBadware.org. But about 30 minutes later, a blog posting on StopBadware.org disputed her explanation. An hour after that, Mayer posted Google's mea culpa.

Below is Mayer's 9:02 a.m. PST posting, with her 10:29 a.m. PST update folded in. Her update acknowledges that StopBadware.org did not provide the wrong information and that it was solely Google's fault. In her update, Mayer wrote: "This post was revised as more precise information has become available."

Note: The sentences that Mayer removed in her update are noted with strike-outs and brackets. The sentences she added in her update are in bold. Here is Mayer's explanation:

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers.

[We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms.]

We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

[We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning.]

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning.

Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.

After Weinstein read Mayer's initial explanation, he asserted that her posting was wrong. At 9:31 a.m. PST, he wrote on the nonprofit's blog:

Google has posted an update on their official blog that erroneously states that Google gets its list of URLs from us. This is not accurate. Google generates its own list of badware URLs, and no data that we generate is supposed to affect the warnings in Google's search listings. We are attempting to work with Google to clarify their statement.

About 10 minutes later, Weinstein updated the post with this:

Google is working on an updated statement. Meanwhile, to clarify some false press reports, it does not appear to be the case that Google has taken down the warnings for legitimately bad sites. We have spot checked a couple known bad sites, and Google is still flagging those sites as bad. i.e., the problem appears to be corrected on their end.

In an e-mail to CNET News at 10:08 a.m. PST, Weinstein reiterated that "Mayer's explanation was inaccurate. She has informed me that Google is working on an updated statement to clarify the facts."

In StopBadware.org's defense, Weinstein added:

Google scans websites to identify sites that may be dangerous to users. When it finds such sites, Google issues warnings in the search results. This morning, they inadvertently added these warnings to nearly all websites, causing user confusion.

StopBadware.org does not provide the data for these warnings. Our role is to use the data provided to us by Google for research/analysis, to support/assist webmasters in cleaning up sites and navigating the review process when their sites are clean, and to provide a third-party review when users hit roadblocks with Google's own process.

Our site was taken down this morning as a result of extremely heavy traffic due to the Google glitch, which led many users to seek additional information. As StopBadware.org is mentioned on the Google warning page that users see when they click on a search result that Google has flagged as bad, many people associated the warnings with us.

In a follow-up e-mail at 11:14 a.m. PST, Weinstein wrote that he was satisfied with Google's corrected response.

"I believe Google's updated statement accurately clarifies that Google does not receive the URL data from us and that we were not involved in this morning's glitch," he wrote.

What a way to start the weekend...

Note: I am in no way related to Maxim Weinstein.