Connecting the dots

I still remember the days when we hook up the Internet at home with a 36.6kbps speed. The dialing of modem which came with buzzing sound indicated that we are connected to the Internet, or not.

Back in the days, Excite was the dominant search engine. It was always Excite until one day when I heard that AltaVista has taken over the reign as the biggest and smartest search engine. It then occurred to me that Excite wasn't a default page that everyone had to use, there were others equally good or better. Then Yahoo! came around with it's fancy yellow icon and content-rich page. Yahoo! was not just search, it tried to be different things to different people. It became my source of search and email.

Things took a turn in 2002 when I entered university. People started hearing about this site called Google, or as I would mispronounced it Goggles (for swimming). Google, like Yahoo, was many things to me. It was more than just a distant company as I had the opportunity to mingle with Googlers in both summers of 2006 an 2007. I was selected for their Google Summer of Code program. For a young man from Malaysia, many thousand miles away from Silicon Valley, which despite growing up using Apple computers and IBM PCs had never had the chance to be close to the happenings of Silicon Valley. Being chosen for the program twice meant that I became part of Silicon Valley happenings, albeit very small, and still somewhat very distant.

Spending two summers with the Summer of Code (SoC) program caused a philosophical shift in how I see things. In a developing country where buying an original Windows would cost my dad couple months of salary, it never occurred to me that software costs money. The only thing that did was hardware, and assembling an IBM PC was such fun. Almost as fun as dismantling them. SoC paid twice for me, in 2006 USD4500 and in 2007 USD 2500. USD4500 was equivalent to eight months of salary for a fresh IT graduate in Malaysia, and I did it in two months each in my 3rd and 4th year. It made me realized how the Internet had opened up possibilities. Another shift for me was to support open cause. If I was on the fence between two software or hardware. I would support the one that is more open, because I felt that the money I paid for had a better chance of flowing back to the community and enjoyed by others. Just I did with SoC.

Soon after graduating, I started working as a coder for JotSpots. Working from Malaysia for a startup in the valley, filling up tax return became interesting, and that was when I started visiting the American embassy. I had false pride when I walked through the heavily gated embassy by showing my tax returns forms while other visa applicants wait in a long line. How shallow of me, and I still am. JotSpot later was bought over by Google and renamed Google Sites. This was my second close encounter to Google. I had no part in any stock options or anything as I was only a part time programmer, and being far away from California didn't help. The funny thing was that it only occurred to me that it was another pride, however false, that I was part of a early team which was bought over by Google.

In 2011 I moved to Beijing from Norway to be closed to the China market. The China market has always been close to my heart, being an ethnic Chinese and an opportunist. The market was opening up and expanding rapidly. I requested a move to Opera China. Google had better services than Baidu. Baidu had to be given credit for operating smarter, and despite being inferior in technology had managed to wrestle a big part of the search share. It was game on and Google came in and started eating up Baidu's share. It stood at about 30/70 between Google and Baidu when the China gate incident, as I would call it, happened. Whether it was a business decision or a moral decision, the departure of Google from China meant that 30% of the population who uses Google started moving elsewhere, and they mostly ended up with Baidu. Just like Yahoo!, Baidu search ranking could be bought. An entire book can be written about such dealings.

The Google Story was written in 2005 and, despite an update, many things have changed. Android is now the biggest theme. It will be interesting to see how things pan out between Android, Apple iOS and Windows. Microsoft, the goliath for the past century, is not as evil as many have thought while Apple and Google are not saints too. One thing is without doubt. A product of the computing and Internet era, all three are remarkable organizations of our time.