Holman W. Jenkins Jr.: Google and the Search for the Future. To some, Google has been looking a bit sallow lately.
The stock is down. Where once everything seemed to go the company's way, along came Apple's iPhone, launching a new wave of Web growth on a platform that largely bypassed the browser and Google's search box. The "app" revolution was going to spell an end to Google's dominance of Web advertising. But that's all so six-months-ago. When a group of Journal editors sat down with Eric Schmidt on a recent Friday, Google's CEO sounded nothing like a man whose company was facing a midlife crisis, let alone intimations of mortality. For one thing, just a couple days earlier, Google had publicly estimated that 200,000 Android smartphones were being activated daily by cell carriers on behalf of customers. True, Apple sells its phones for luscious margins, while Google gives away Android to handset makers for free. "In general in technology," he says, "if you own a platform that's valuable, you can monetize it.
" Can it all be so easy? Says Mr. A few thoughts on name changes & reputation. I’ve changed my name twice.
First, I took my (now ex) stepfather’s last name when I was a child. At 18, I started the process to take my maternal grandfather’s name to honor him and to create an identity that meant something to me. The process was finalized when I was 22. And let me tell you, it was a Pain in the F* Ass. With this in mind, I nearly bowled over laughing when I read that Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal that he thought that name changes would become more common place. “[Schmidt] predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.”
This is ludicrous on many accounts. Changing one’s name didn’t used to be a big deal. That point aside, reputation is built up over time. To make matters worse, changing your name doesn’t let you avoid past names. Google CEO Eric Schmidt Advises You Change Your Name To Escape Online Shame. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Google CEO Eric Schmidt discussed the future of search, how newspapers will survive, and what's next for Google.
As ReadWriteWeb highlighted, Schmidt also shared some surprisingly frank, eyebrow-raising opinions on privacy online and the lengths to which we will have to go to protect our reputations in what the New York Times called an age defined by "the impossibility of erasing your posted past and moving on. " The Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins writes in his interview with Eric Schmidt that the CEO "predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites. " "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," Schmidt said. Will we really use this "restart button? "