Saturday, September 1, 2007

You read it here first ...

It looks like someone at The Economist magazine is reading this blog! They took two of my recent posts: Can Google be trusted? and MaaS - Money as a Service and combined them into one article called: Who's afraid of Google?:

Google is often compared to Microsoft (another enemy, incidentally); but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people's money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals.


It is a good article and it fully supports my belief that SaaS can be only successful if SaaS providers behave more like banks and less like software companies...

5 comments:

Kris Tuttle said...

A good analogy I heard from a company trying to provide on-demand virtualized resources around the world was that a network of such services needs to look just like a Visa/MasterCard arrangement.

Visa, MasterCard and the comprehensive service network offered by industry players, most notably First Data Corporation, is a great example of how SaaS will have to evolve.

Marek Prochazka said...

Funnily enough, a Czech weekly called Respekt apears to reprint the article by The Economist in its latest release. However, they have the
"Who Is Afraid of Google" title on the cover page, while inside you only find the other article from The Economist, "Inside the Googleplex". That one was commented by a Google engineer only as "surely medially attractive".

Jakub said...

The same issue carried results of research carried out by The Economist Intelligence Unit on various issues. Some of the reports are published freely. Most notably, the Democracy index places Czech Republic six places above UK and seven above France. Shocking for some maybe. But in line with my recent feelings about coming back to the country.

Jakub said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jakub said...

Wrong address. Rankings available here.