Google shares top $1,000 after strong earnings

Google shares have topped $1,000 (£617) for the first time, jumping 13.8% on Friday after the company reported better-than-expected earnings.

Shares in the online giant closed 122 points up at $1,011.4, and have risen 42% since the start of 2013.

Friday's share price rise followed the company posting a 36% jump in net profits to $2.97bn for the July-to-September period on Thursday.

Google's revenues also beat forecasts with a 12% rise year-on-year.

"We are closing in on our goal of a beautiful, simple, and intuitive experience regardless of your device," Google's chief Larry Page said in a conference call with analysts.

The strong earnings report also helped other online companies, with Facebook shares adding 4.4% to a new high of more than $55. Amazon rose 3.4%.

Google's market value is about $334bn, which is still well below Apple's $461bn.

Google was floated in August 2004 at $85 a share, giving the company a market value at the time of $23bn.

The company reported its quarterly earnings on Thursday after US markets had closed.

Google said that paid-for clicks increased by a quarter during the July-to-September period, from a year earlier, the highest rate of growth in the past year.

This offset an 8% fall in average cost-per-click, the price advertisers pay Google when consumers click on their ads.

"We view solid paid clicks growth to be a good indicator of demand, driven by the continued shift to mobile," JP Morgan analysts said in a note.

Video ads

Several brokers have raised their share price target for Google on the back of the company's new initiatives to attract advertisers.

In February, the company launched a service to help advertisers market through a mix of smartphones, tablets and desktop computers. And analysts believe there is still significant potential to generate revenues from its video-streaming website YouTube.

YouTube-branded video-ads surged more than 75% in the quarter from a year earlier, with 40% of traffic now coming from mobile devices.

"We estimate that Google's key YouTube asset generated approximately $4bn in revenue in 2012, positioning Google extremely well for the strong growth in video advertising," RBC Capital Markets analysts wrote in a note.

Analysts at Jefferies said Google is best positioned to benefit from mobile devices with one billion activations of its Android system. Google sells applications and content through its Google Play store.

Google Acquires YC-Backed Flutter, A Gesture Recognition Technology Startup, For Around $40M

Google’s Glass, Android and other products may soon be picking up more Kinect-style gesture features: the company has bought Flutter, a Y Combinator-backed startup that focuses on gesture recognition technology. Its first and only product — an app that provides gesture detection and recognition from standard webcam devices — will remain live and operational, the company says.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we have heard that the price was around $40 million.

Flutter confirmed the news on its site, where it said it will continue to offer its app — it currently has a Mac app — while it also works on research at Google. “We are thrilled to announce that we will be continuing our research at Google. We share Google’s passion for 10x thinking, and we’re excited to add their rocket fuel to our journey,” Navneet Dalal, one of the co-founders, writes. (Nice gaming reference, Navneet!) The full note follows below.

That Mac app (which, btw, added Chrome support in February) clearly struck a chord, with downloads in more than 90 countries, reaching the top-five apps in the Mac App Store in its first two weeks of launch in some 30 of those, and number 1 in 14. It had around 1 million users on desktop.

Flutter had been planning to launch a new product in August, we understand, but that plan abruptly got delayed. Today’s news gives us a clue why. What was that product? Likely a Windows version, which was already in private alpha; or an enhanced Mac version with more features — which was also in the works, as Dalal and his co-founder Mehul Nariyawala noted to Colleen last year.

Flutter was in the YC winter class of 2012, and had raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz,NEA, and Spring Ventures, along with Start Fund and a handful of individual angel investors.

Gesture technology is a big area these days, with services such as those from Microsoft and the Kinect, along with other products like the Leap Motion sensor bringing the concept into the mainstream. Others that are also investing further in gesture technology include Intel’s acquisition of Omek. Apple, meanwhile, has yet to make a move here but there have been rumors that it will, too.

It’s unclear if Google will keep Flutter working on standalone apps, or whether the technology will get integrated further into its own software and hardware. For now, a Google spokesperson had this to say:

“We’re really impressed by the Flutter team’s ability to design new technology based on cutting-edge research. We look forward to supporting and collaborating on their research efforts at Google.”

Here’s the full note from Flutter announcing the sale and a video of Flutter from its launch:

When we started three years ago, our dream to build a ubiquitous and power-efficient gesture recognition technology was considered by many as just “a dream”, not a real possibility. Since then, we have strived to build the best machine vision algorithms and a delightful user experience.

Even after we launched our first app, we didn’t stop our research; your enthusiasm and support pushed us to continue to do better. We’re inspired everyday when we hear, for example, that Flutter makes you feel like a superhero — because any sufficiently advanced technology should be indistinguishable from magic, right?

Today, we are thrilled to announce that we will be continuing our research at Google. We share Google’s passion for 10x thinking, and we’re excited to add their rocket fuel to our journey.

We’d like to extend a special thank you to all of our users; your feedback and evangelism inspire us every day. Flutter users will be able to continue to use the app, and stay tuned for future updates.

Google and Europe Near Deal

BRUSSELS — Google’s antitrust troubles in Europe moved closer to a settlement Tuesday after the European Union’s antitrust chief said he had accepted the online giant’s latest offer to settle a long-running investigation of its search and advertising businesses.

But Joaquín Almunia, the E.U. competition commissioner, said Google’s rivals should be given an opportunity to respond to the proposals. That means that the process of reaching a final agreement with Google would probably last until spring 2014 — nearly four years after the inquiry began, and long after Google’s $50 billion business has evolved well beyond basic Web search.

And Mr. Almunia said it was still possible that efforts to reach a negotiated agreement could break down, leaving him with no choice but to send Google formal charges.

“The settlement route remains the best choice,” Mr. Almunia said at a meeting of digital companies and lobbyists at the European Parliament in Brussels.

A settlement in Europe would allow Google to escape a potential fine of up to $5 billion and a finding of wrongdoing that could limit its activities in the future. The company has already settled a similar case in the United States.

Google’s competitors raised immediate concerns about the latest effort by Mr. Almunia to settle with Google.

“It is far from clear from Commissioner Almunia’s description of the revised package of proposed commitments that they go nearly far enough,” said David Wood, the legal counsel for Icomp, an industry group backed by Microsoft and a number of other companies that have complained about Google to European authorities.

Mr. Wood said the latest offer by Google should be carefully tested in the marketplace to assure that the remedies addressed complaints that the company favored its own products in search results.

The case, which the European Commission formally opened in November 2010, revolves around claims that Google has abused its dominance in the Internet search and advertising field by, among other things, favoring its own products and services in search results. Google powers 90 percent of searches in many European markets; its share in the United States is closer to 70 percent.

Among the latest elements that Google has offered to open up competition was “an option to bid for each specific query so smaller search operators can be displayed,” Mr. Almunia said Tuesday.

In July, Mr. Almunia rejected a preliminary settlement he had struck with Google after industry groups complained that aspects of the deal could strengthen, rather than loosen, Google’s hold in Europe. That proposal would not have required the company to change the algorithm, or formula, that produces its search results.

But it would have been the first time Google had agreed to legally binding changes to its search results, and it went much further than the minor concessions it made to settle a case before the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

Mr. Almunia said Tuesday that he was not seeking to regulate “a specific algorithm” or prevent the company from improving its services.

Google on Tuesday portrayed its latest offer as something it agreed to under only considerable pressure from the European authorities.

The European Commission had “insisted on further, significant changes to the way we display search results,” Kent Walker, a senior vice president at Google, said in a statement that was issued shortly after Mr. Almunia finished speaking. “While competition online is thriving, we’ve made the difficult decision to agree to their requirements in the interests of reaching a settlement.”

To be sure, Mr. Almunia has been under pressure for years from Google’s rivals to prolong its legal entanglements in Europe and toughen the terms of any deal.

Apparently seeking to tamp down those demands, Mr. Almunia suggested the latest offer was the best deal he could get for the European consumer in a sector as complex and rapidly evolving as online commerce and digital media.

“Since we started the investigation, the way search results are presented and the kind of services provided have changed many times,” he told the lawyers and lobbyists. “European users want undistorted competition and choice in online search and search advertising." Mr. Almunia added that users “want it now and, if possible, deserve it now, and not after many years of litigation.”

Whatever its limits, the deal may also be the most that Mr. Almunia would be able to get from Google, without resorting to years of litigation.

Executives at the company have grown frustrated in recent months, particularly after being asked to tweak their offer a second time. Each of those changes required careful analysis by teams of engineers and experts in advertising in California — several time zones away from the company’s legal team in Brussels, where much of the negotiation has taken place.

Mr. Almunia said Google improved its previous offer in four areas that he said in May 2012 “may be considered as abuses of dominance.”

These original four areas of concern included whether Google might have unfairly exploited its market position by displaying links to its own services, like Google maps or images, when it answers a query, giving preference to them over those of competitors.

The four original concerns also covered whether Google put material in its own search results that was copied from competitors’ Web sites. The other two areas involved how Google conducts its advertising business, including how it delivers search ads on partner sites.

Mr. Almunia said on Tuesday that he “cannot describe the details” of the latest offer by Google, and the company said it would not release them yet, either.

But in the area of search, Mr. Almunia said links to rivals would be made “significantly more visible” and that a “larger space of the Google search result page is dedicated to them.” The rivals “have the possibility to display their logo next to the link, and there will be a dynamic text associated to each rival link to better inform the user of its content,” he said. Smaller specialized search companies also would be given a better chance of being found on Google’s powerful search engine.

To placate publishers and advertisers, Mr. Almunia said he had accepted terms from Google that tightened the terms of the company’s previous concessions.

Even with a settlement Mr. Almunia would be able to do what the United States has not, and reach a legally binding deal on the way the company runs its search business.

That showed that Brussels. where the European Commission is based, is becoming the powerhouse for regulating multinational companies, said Luke M. Froeb, who teaches competition policy at the Vanderbilt University business school and formerly worked on antitrust at the F.T.C.

“In the U.S., the agencies try to make a big deal of, ‘We are enforcers, not regulators.’ In the E.U., they are not concerned with that distinction,” said Mr. Froeb.

Mr. Almunia can fine and order companies to change their business practices directly, unlike in the United States, where agencies need a court order first. Companies can appeal such penalties, but such cases can take years to make their way through the European Court of Justice, the highest tribunal in the bloc.

But experts also cautioned that this might come too late in a fast-changing industry like technology. For instance, much of the digital world has moved to mobile phones, where Google and its competitors face different issues.

“By the time this decision comes down, the world will have moved on to something else,” Mr. Froeb said.

Even some of Google’s competitors that have in the past complained about Google’s behavior to regulators said the time had come and gone for a decision in the European Union to make a big difference to them. They have already been forced to adapt to living in Google’s world, they said, and have in most cases been growing despite the hurdles that Google erected. Those competitors spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to comment publicly on a rival and because they still support efforts to rein in Google’s power.

On Tuesday, Mr. Almunia suggested that some of the concessions he had extracted from Google would apply to that world of new, mobile devices.

The “new proposal more appropriately addresses the need for any commitments to be able to cover future developments,” said Mr. Almunia, adding that it “relates to queries entered in Google in whatever form, whether they are typed or spoken, and irrespective of the entry point or the device.”

Gmail Wiretapping Case Will Continue, Judge Rules

Google's motion to dismiss allegations that Gmail service is violating wiretapping laws by scanning emails was rejected.

Even as Google celebrates its 15th birthday today, a new court ruling finds that Google's practice of searching email accounts to come up with keyword-based targeted advertising may be violating Federal and California wiretapping laws.

The ruling from US District Judge Lucy Koh is part of a pending class-action suit that accuses Google of wiretapping every time it scans users' Gmail accounts to look for keywords that it can use for ads within Google services. Koh's ruling was in response to Google's motion to dismiss the whole case before it even got started.

Google's motion was based on two arguments: that there was no actual interception of user's messages because there was no interception "device" used, because the "reading of any

emails would fall within the 'ordinary course of business' exception to the definition of device. The second argument was that Gmail users knew what they were getting into when they signed the Gmail terms of service.

Koh wasn't buying what Google was trying to sell.

In the exception argument, Koh used precedence to establish that a process used in the "ordinary course of business" does not mean every process can be used—only the functions that are only necessary to the transmission of email.

"Google's alleged interceptions are neither instrumental to the provision of email services, nor are they an incidental effect of providing these services. The Court therefore finds that Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that the interceptions fall outside Google’s ordinary course of business," Koh wrote.

As for user consent, Koh did not believe that Google had done an adequate job spelling out the email scanning practice in its Terms of Service and Privacy Policies. And non-Gmail users were getting their emails scanned without any say in the matter whatsoever.

Koh's ruling is not a declaration of guilt. It merely states that the plaintiffs in the case against Google do indeed have an effective enough argument so the case won't be dismissed before it even goes to trial.

Google is expected to appeal this ruling on its motion to dismiss. If that appeal fails, it will seriously hurt Google's defense that scanning emails for keywords is a normal part of how it handles email delivery.

If, ultimately, the plaintiffs win their case against Google altogether, the impact could be huge: while it is not clear how much specific revenue Google gets from email-based advertising, eMarketer estimates that Google holds a total of $34.5 billion of the $104 billion digital ad market in 2013.

If any significant share of that revenue comes from Gmail ads—and given Gmail's 425 million-plus users, that seems likely—losing this case could be a big blow to Google's revenue stream.

Google revamps logo and search page

Google has begun rolling out a redesign of its homepage - the world's most visited web address.

The revamp features a flattened, reshaped logo and replaces the previous menu bar with a smaller range of links on the page's right-hand side.

The move comes in the same month that Yahoo's logo and Microsoft's Bing search tool have also been updated.

A Google spokeswoman said that similar changes would now be "slowly rolled out" across its products.

A blog post added that the firm intended to "streamline" users' experience of its services to prevent "distractions".

It is the first change to Google's logo since 2010. Not all users will be able to see the redesign yet.

"This is the season for consumer tech updates and whether you sell a product or it's free everyone wants to look fresh ahead of the Christmas shopping season," said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at the tech consultancy Forrester.

"What they are doing is actually pretty subtle and that's because these software companies depend on user loyalty - they don't want to do anything that would alienate their customers."

Another analyst suggested that cutting down the number of links would encourage people to use Google's social network, Google Plus.

To reveal other products - such as Google Drive storage, YouTube videos or the Android app Play Store - visitors to the firm's search page must now click on an icon made up of small squares.

"I do think that there is a move to try to make Google+ more central to everything its users do," said Carolina Milanesi from the tech advisors Gartner.

"It might be the case that it is not obvious to some people that they need to click on the box to reveal the firm's other services."

Google vs. Death

How CEO Larry Page has transformed the search giant into a factory for moonshots. Our exclusive look at his boldest bet yet — to extend human life

Larry Page, 40, is the co-founder and CEO of one of the most successful, ubiquitous and increasingly strange companies on the planet. Google is, of course, in the search business, and, more important for its profitability, it is in the online-advertising business. But it's also in the driverless-car business, the wearable-computing business, and the business of providing Internet access to remote areas via high-altitude balloons, among countless others.

Page prefers to refer to the search giant's more out-there ventures as moon shots. At the moment Google is preparing an especially uncertain and distant shot. It is planning to launch Calico, a new company that will focus on health and aging in particular. "In some industries," says Page, who spoke exclusively with TIME about the new venture, "it takes 10 or 20 years to go from an idea to something being real. Health care is certainly one of those areas. We should shoot for the things that are really, really important, so 10 or 20 years from now we have those things done."

The unavoidable question this raises is why a company built on finding information and serving ads next to it is spending untold amounts on a project that flies in the face of the basic fact of the human condition, the existential certainty of aging and death? To which the unavoidable answer is another question: Who the hell else is going to do it?

Google's new venture focuses on aging and diseases

Google is searching for longer life, announcing on Wednesday the formation of a health company focused on aging and associated diseases.

Arthur Levinson, the former chief executive officer and current chairman of biotechnology giant Genentech, will lead the new venture, known as Calico.

The launch of an independent company represents an unusual tack for Google, which typically fosters out-there ideas through its secretive Google X division or invests in promising startups through Google Ventures. But the ambitiousness of the project is in line with the thinking of co-founder and CEO Larry Page, who has taken a series of bold steps since returning to the helm in the spring of 2011.

Google earns most of its money from the ads that pop up alongside search results, but it's working on driverless cars, Internet-connected glasses, and stratospheric balloons that could help get more of the developing world online.

"Illness and aging affect all our families," Page said in a statement. "With some longer-term, moon-shot thinking around health care and biotechnology, I believe we can improve millions of lives."

Effect, not cause

Slowing the aging process promises considerable bang for the buck, because many illnesses appear to be the effect, not cause, of getting older, including cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's and various forms of cancer.

"By the time you get really sick, it's hard to put you back together again," said Brian Kennedy, chief executive officer of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato. "But slowing aging delays the onset of all these diseases."

Time magazine published a cover story on the new venture Wednesday, featuring a wide-ranging interview with Page. But ultimately neither he nor Google revealed detailed plans, such as the intended avenues of research or where the company would be located. Google didn't respond to an inquiry from The Chronicle.

Personal motivation?

There may be some personal motivation at play in these efforts. All of us age, of course, but Google co-founders Page and Sergey Brin both face specific health issues. Page suffers from vocal cord nerve damage that has left him speaking faintly. And Brin has a genetic mutation that may leave him more susceptible to developing Parkinson's disease.

Google has dipped a toe into the health field before, bringing data to bear on various problems through initiatives like Google Flu Trends and investments in companies like 23andMe (co-founded by Brin's wife, Anne Wojcicki, from whom he is separated), which does genetic testing.

Indeed, much of medical research today relies on advances in information technology that allow scientists to derive insights from vast sets of data - and it's a good guess that Calico will embrace such tools as well.

Data sets

As Time reported: "Google is very, very good with large data sets. While the company is holding its cards about Calico close to the vest, expect it to use its core data-handling skills to shed new light on familiar age-related maladies. Sources close to the project suggest it will start small and focus entirely on researching new technologies."

The mere fact that Google is stepping into this space doesn't mean it will achieve any breakthroughs. As with most medical research, advances will require considerable time and money, if they come at all. It's notable that there haven't been any runaway successes in efforts to reverse the aging process.

But there has certainly been progress, Kennedy said. Drugs have been shown to slow the aging process in mice, including rapamycin, which is already approved for other uses in humans.

The Bay Area is a rich vein for academic and nonprofit research in the field. Advanced work is under way at Stanford University's Center on Longevity and UC Berkeley's Center for Research & Education on Aging, as well as at the Buck Institute.

Telomeres research

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Blackburn of UCSF shared the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2009 for work on telomeres, a kind of protective cap on the end of chromosomes that shrink as people age, and the enzyme known as telomerase that replenishes their length. She and other researchers formed Telome Health of Menlo Park in 2010 to develop and sell telomere testing products.

Other scientists have focused on the role of protein misfolding and DNA mutations in aging, but increasingly it appears that the process is a complicated one involving all of these factors and more.

New resources

The key thing holding up additional advances is a lack of resources, so Kennedy said he welcomes the entrance of Google and its immensely deep pockets. "We're all speculating as to what they're going to do, but it's very exciting for the field," he said.

Levinson, who will also keep his position as chairman of Apple, shared more about how the venture came about in a public Google+ post.

"We agreed that with great people, a strong culture and vision and a healthy disregard for the impossible, we could make progress tackling these questions and improving people's lives," he said.

Levinson added that Calico is officially an abbreviation for the "California Life Co."

"But if you're thinking about cats, we like the old saying that they have nine lives," he said.

Google's AdID to take a bite out of third-party cookies

Much the way Apple took the reins of advertising on iOS with iAd, Google has a plan to replace third-party advertiser-tracking cookies with a proprietary identifier called AdID.

You're not the only one unhappy with the proliferation of third-party cookies. So is Google, which has a plan called AdID to cut them from your online advertising diet.

The proposal could upend the $120 billion online advertising business, simultaneously giving more control over which ads are shown to customers and to Google as well, reports USA Today.

The story, based on a single, anonymous source at Google who is "familiar" with the plan but was not authorized to speak to the press, says that AdID could give Google a big bump to the company's online ad business. Google controls around one-third of all online advertising revenue.

"The AdID would be transmitted to advertisers and ad networks that have agreed to basic guidelines, giving consumers more privacy and control over how they browse the Web," the anonymous source told the paper.

The report said that Google is planning a push in the coming weeks and months to secure backing from government agencies, consumer groups, and online advertisers.

Google, for its part, denied that any plans are imminent. "We believe that technological enhancements can improve users' security while ensuring the Web remains economically viable," a Google spokesperson told CNET. "We and others have a number of concepts in this area, but they're all at very early stages."

Topics: Google, Advertising and marketing Tags: cookie, AdID, tracking, advertising, Google

Pakistan ban on Google's YouTube challenged in court

Islamabad: ToffeeTV has hit an unexpected snag. The Internet startup depended on YouTube to promote "Hokey-Pokey," "The Umm Nyum Nyum Song" and other language-teaching clips it produces for children, but the video-sharing website has been banned in Pakistan for nearly a year.

The measure was imposed to block videos that Muslims took as insulting and blasphemous. But the unintended consequence has been frustration for many companies, educators and students. A petition to end Internet censorship is before a Pakistani court, and a debate has been rekindled over how to reconcile the right to a free flow of information with a widespread public sentiment that Islam needs special protections.

ToffeeTV has had to save its clips on its own servers and delay the rollout of its apps, says company co-founder Rabia Garib. "It threw us off our feet," she said. "We're off schedule by about eight months."

While the tech-savvy have ways to get around the ban, the vast majority of Pakistanis who try to view YouTube get this: "Surf Safely! ... The site you are trying to access contains content that is prohibited for viewership from within Pakistan."

The made-in-America trailer for "Innocence of Muslims," the movie of which has never reached cinemas, provoked uproar throughout the Muslim world, and several US diplomatic missions were targeted. In Pakistan, clashes between police and protesters left 19 people dead.

YouTube as well as Facebook were initially blocked although the government soon exempted Facebook, saying it removed the offensive material. At the time, US President Barack Obama's administration asked Google, YouTube's parent, to take down the video. But the company refused, saying the trailer didn't violate its content standards.

The only other countries that block YouTube are Tajikistan, China and Iran, according to Google's transparency report that tracks restrictions of its products. Another 56 countries have localised versions of YouTube that allow for tailoring content to local standards.

Pakistan, a nation of roughly 180 million, has a democratically elected government and a legal system inherited from its former British rulers. But that system also contains significant religious strictures, and disputes over religion frequently end in bloodshed. So at the time the YouTube ban was imposed, many saw it as a necessary calming measure.

Now an advocacy group called Bytes for All is petitioning the Lahore High Court to order an end to all Internet censorship.

Muzzling YouTube "could lead to the opening up of an entire Pandora's box of moral policing and dictatorial controls despite the democracy being in place," said Furhan Hussain of Bytes for All.

At the organisation's Islamabad offices, activists say the YouTube case is just the latest example. Over the years the government has periodically banned Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, but the YouTube ban has lasted the longest.

It can be circumvented via VPNs, virtual private networks that mask the user's computer but are prone to viruses and slow the Internet connection.

These proxies are too cumbersome for his staff to deal with, says Jawwad Ahmed Farid, founder and CEO of Karachi-based Alchemy Technologies, which does risk-management training for financial professionals.

It posts short videos of its classes on YouTube to attract business, but uploads fewer of them following the ban, and the volume of Pakistani customers referred through YouTube has fallen, Farid said. "My team finds it very difficult to work with all the proxies in place. It certainly slows it down a bit," he said.

Sidra Qasim is co-CEO of HOMETOWN, a Lahore-based company that helps leather workers to market products such as shoes and belts online. It used YouTube to reach customers and also to teach the workers new techniques. "Now that training part is stopped totally," she said.

A committee of officials from various ministries is looking for solutions and will make the decision on whether to unblock YouTube. But experts aren't sure a technical solution even exists, and Bytes for All and others say that even if the government comes up with a filtering mechanism, they will continue to resist it as censorship.

Kamran Ali, a spokesman for the Ministry of Internet Technology, acknowledged that the ban can be a hardship but said the government must weigh freedom of information against offending the public.

"It's a Muslim country, and this video clearly violates the religious sentiments of the people of Pakistan," he said.

At Air University in Islamabad, some students supported a government-imposed filter. "If they are able to control this blasphemous material that would be a good step," said Waqar ur-Rehman, 21.

But they recognized the difficulty of actually coming up with a system, and some argued against any restrictions, if only because they could be evaded.

"I think the ban shouldn't have been there. It (the movie) hurt a lot of religious sentiments, mine as well, but it was not the right way to do it, because there are so many ways to go around it," said Palwasha Khursheed, who studies electrical engineering.

Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, a Muslim cleric, acknowledged the ban was porous, and said Pakistan was missing an opportunity to use technology such as YouTube to educate people about Islam.

He urged the government to lift the ban, but only after installing filters, saying, "We must not allow anyone to attack our cultural values."

One solution would be a localised version of YouTube for Pakistan. But Google would need immunity from prosecution for any offending content, and Pakistani law so far doesn't allow for such an arrangement.

"It is Google's goal to offer local versions of YouTube to more places worldwide, but it takes time," said Google in a statement to The Associated Press in request for comment about the court case. "The localisation process can be lengthy as we research laws and build relationships with local content creators."

The Apple Era begins as Microsoft, Google shift to a hardware centric model

The formerly universal consensus that widely licensed software (like Windows) would always win out over integrated hardware products (like the Macintosh) has finally reached a definitive end, years after being proved wrong. 

A long monopoly game finally ends

At some point in the 1990s, the supremacy of broadly licensed operating systems became an unquestionably held dogma. 

This began as a reaction to the success of Windows, but was reinforced with the failure of every integrated hardware product that failed in its wake, including the Acorn Archimedes, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga and BeBox. Apple's Macintosh was the only non-Windows PC to survive the decade, but the company was still labeled "beleaguered" for daring to remain in business.

The notion that an integrated PC wouldn't and couldn't sell without Windows even caused Apple's 1990s leadership to pursue Windows-like licensing programs, first with the Newton OS and then with the Mac OS in 1995. 

Other companies also tried to introduce broadly licensed Windows alternatives, most notably IBM's OS/2, but also Sun's Solaris and Steve Jobs' NeXTSTEP for Intel PCs. 

It seemed that nobody was willing to question the idea that the only way to sell an operating system was Microsoft's Windows Way, despite the fact that nobody was really able to successfully copy Microsoft either. 

In reality, Microsoft didn't happen upon the True Way to sell technology. It simply won by cheating, erecting a monopoly where nobody else could actually play. Software alternatives were locked out of the market by illegal tying agreements, while Microsoft's hardware "partners" were duped (for decades!) into funneling most of their profits to Microsoft. 

This continued for so long in large part because the tech media overwhelmingly refused to judge the PC game as impartial journalists and instead largely assumed the role of Microsoft flatterers, weaving rich tapestries of prose to glorify the Windows Empire's fine New Clothes. 

Technology shifts, but the world refuses to notice

The technology world was so thoroughly convinced that Microsoft's Windows was the One And Only Way to sell computing that nearly everyone refused to observe or consider the accumulating data conflicting with this "common sense" opinion. 

The first evidence that broadly licensed software wasn't necessarily a superior model for selling technology came from parallel efforts to be like Microsoft: IBM, Apple, Sun and NeXT all failed to replicate the Windows model with their own licensing programs. 

Even more persuasive should have been the clearly observable inability of Microsoft to spread Windows Everywhere. A string of Windows failures that began early in the 1990s was carefully excused and ignored by the tech media in its collective refusal to be anything but an extension of Microsoft's PR department. 

From Windows for Pen to WinPad to Windows Handheld PC to Windows Palm-sized PC and Pocket PC to "Windows Powered" (and other Windows CE initiatives including Mira Smart Displays and Media2Go/PlaysForSure/Zune and Windows Mobile/Windows Phone) to Windows Tablets, Slate PC and UltraMobile PCs, Microsoft's every effort to duplicate its Windows PC model in new product segments or form factors simply fell flat on its face. 

Palm proves Windows doesn't work: 2003-2007

A third experiment testing the supremacy of broadly licensing a technology came in the early 2000s, when Palm's PDA business began to falter, much like Apple had a decade previously. Palm's situation was nearly identical to Apple's in the early 1990s: it had a popular integrated product saddled with aging system software and an increasingly obsolete CPU architecture. 

Everyone offered the company the same advice they'd offered Apple, invariably recommending that it split its hardware and software businesses, broadly license out its software like Microsoft, and perhaps even license Windows from Microsoft.

After briefly duplicating many aspects of Apple's turnaround strategy being accomplished in parallel under Steve Jobs (Palm even brought back its own founder, Jeff Hawkins, in a move to enter the new smartphone market being pioneered by Hawkins' Handspring Treos), the company then shifted to a Windows Enthusiast game plan.

That proved disastrous. Licensing Palm OS briefly appeared to work (Palm even signed up Sony as an enthusiastic partner) but soon failed; Sony backed out by 2004. Splitting the company into hardware (palmOne) and software (PalmSource) created confusion and support headaches for customers, with no clear benefits. 

Licensing Windows Mobile from Microsoft and selling that alongside its own Palm OS created even more confusion, and resulted in a slashing of Palm's own installed base. But it wasn't Microsoft's Windows licensing that finally killed Palm: it was an integrated device: Apple's iPhone. 

Apple proves integrated products can work: 1997-2007

A decade prior to the release of the iPhone, Apple began a turnaround under Jobs that refocused the company on doing the unthinkable: selling integrated products in a Windows-dominated world. Among Jobs' first decisions were the termination of Apple's Newton and Mac OS licensing programs. 

Jobs then focused Apple on doing something that nobody else in the PC business was doing: creating innovative, tightly integrated packages of hardware and software.

From the striking new iMac in 1998 (above) to strategic investments in PowerBooks and iBook notebooks, Jobs turned Apple from being a "non-Windows compatible PC" maker into a fashionable, innovative, trendsetting designer of a series of new computing products that began leading, rather than following, the rest of the PC industry.

In 2001, Apple entered a new market with iPod, leveraging internal assets (like Firewire) and external assets (like Toshiba's compact hard drive and Pixo's embedded OS) and integrating them all into a desirable, functional, valuable package it could sell at a profit.

Oddly, this is the basic strategy of nearly every product designed outside of the technology sector, but was not really being pursued by anyone else inside the tech world, and in particular not among the blind OEMs clinging to Microsoft for direction and vision.

By 2003, Apple's iPod was globally popular and monumentally profitable. Yet its primary competitor, in the minds of the tech media, was a broadly licensed technology platform being fronted by Microsoft: PlaysForSure. Read any of the tech punditry from that period for some hilarious mass delusion about how Microsoft was guaranteed to overtake and trounce Apple's iPod.

Instead, iPod stomped PlaysForSure into the horse manure. Microsoft had failed repeatedly before, but never in a way that mattered, and never to an integrated product (the closest experience being the short lived success of the Palm Pilot, which as noted above, was successfully hoodwinked into carrying Microsoft's water to the point of exhaustion).

Apple's thrashing of Microsoft's broadly licensed PlaysForSure platform with its own integrated product continued for years while the tech media refused to believe what it was observing, from 2003 to 2006. Meanwhile, Microsoft embarked on the unthinkable: it began copying Apple's integrated product strategy with its own Zune.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft was as bad at playing in Apple's home court as Apple had been in trying to play by Microsoft's platform licensing game. The Zune was an embarrassing failure across its several generations.

Canalys U.S. smartphone figures

In 2007, Apple brought its integrated product savvy into direct competition with Microsoft's decade old experiment with Windows CE/Windows Mobile in the arena of smartphones. After its first full quarter of sales, Apple's iPhone had surpassed Microsoft's U.S. smartphone sales, despite Windows Mobile's half-decade head start in smartphones.

Microsoft enters integrated products: 2008-2013

In an effort to remain competitive with Apple's iPhone, Microsoft did something unpredictable: it acquired a mobile phone hardware company. No, it did not start with Nokia.

In 2008 Microsoft spent half a billion dollars to acquire Danger, Inc, a startup co-founded by Andy Rubin. Danger was essentially the predecessor of what became Android: a Linux/Java based integrated mobile product.

Rather than playing up Danger's strengths (Danger's Sidekick was at the time a popular, cloud-centric mobile texting device), Microsoft did to it what it had done with a series of other hardware-related acquisitions, including WebTV: it forcibly fed Windows down its throat like a unlucky duck being raised for foie gras.

After destroying Danger's credibility by bungling its existing cloud infrastructure, Microsoft converted Danger into an integrated product so terrible that it couldn't remain on the market for more than 48 days. This was KIN, a product so dreadful it made the Zune look like a resounding success in comparison.

While Microsoft diddled with KIN under the Pink Project, Apple had been developing its third major integrated product success with the iPad. To compete with this rumored tablet, Microsoft rushed to market "Slate PC" in a partnership with HP, its long time Windows PC licensee partner.

Slate PC beat iPad to market, but it was so battered against the ground by iPad that only a few thousand of the devices were even built. That didn't stop the tech media from inventing excuses for it or trying to explain how Microsoft was really only trying to achieve failure in tablets because it didn't need to compete, being seated on top of the Windows Monopoly and all.

This myopic, willful ignorance and excuse-centric, platitude-barfing flattery of Microsoft's every misstep might have made sense in the 1990s, but by 2010 the kowtowing tech media's fawning over Microsoft was as unnecessary as the lickspittle sycophants of the royal court after the revolution had beheaded their monarchs.

Three years later, all Microsoft has done is port its desktop Windows to ARM under the "RT" brand and deliver two versions of a new Surface Tablet PC hybrid that nobody even wants one of. Even Microsoft's licensees don't want Windows RT, and they aren't that enthused about the Zune/Windows Phone/Surface inspired version of Windows 8, either.

All that's left for Microsoft to do now is acquire the remains of Nokia and complete the foie gras hardware-husbandry that last produced the stillborn KIN. If it weren't for Android, the broadly-licensed enthusiast media wouldn't have anything at all to breathlessly fawn over.

Google enters broadly licensed platforms: 2006-2013

Given that Microsoft's one hit Windows wonder was running into clear troubles with Longhorn/Vista by 2006, it's hard to explain in retrospect why the tech media was so completely unaware of the transformation taking place in its own industry.

The tech media was so willfully blind to the overwhelming sales success of millions of iPods and a similar erosion of the mobile industry (then dominated by the broadly licensed Symbian and JavaME) by iPhone that it applauded Google's Android project as a successor and heir apparent to Windows Mobile.

Android was (and still is!) broadly viewed as fated to inherit a divine right to the Microsoft Windows crown in a post-revolution world where that crown remains firmly attached to a beheaded head still gasping for relevance and obeisance (although Steve Ballmer isn't expected to survive the year).

What started out as simply grading Android on a curve as a scrappy underdog turned into a deifying worship of a clownish green mascot and a reverence of Google's every move, regardless of its eventual failure, from the company's flag waving support for the doomed Adobe Flash to the Google Wallet/NFC fiasco to its ineffectual WebM shenanigans.

Google's Android began running into the same integration and fragmentation problems that had previously complicated Windows PCs, Apple's Mac Clone program, Palm's licensing initiatives and Sun's JavaME. From vendor bloatware to device and app incompatibles, things got so bad in Android land that Google resolved in 2010 to solve them the same way Microsoft had with the Zune just a few years earlier.

Google enters integrated devices: 2010-2013


Google hailed its HTC-built Nexus One as its first experiment in "pure Android." After that experiment flopped, it teamed up with Samsung to introduce two more flops: the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus, then partnered with LG to deliver the Nexus 4, a fourth Nexus to not sell very well.

But no criticism, please! The broadly licensed platform monarch demands your groveling support. Viva lèse-majesté!

At the same time, like Microsoft, Google also wanted Apple's iPad business. So in 2011 it stopped development of Android smartphones and dedicated Android 3.0 entirely to the launch of a new broadly licensed platform for Android tablets: Honeycomb. That ended up a spectacular failure that maintained a brilliant fireball of free fall disaster throughout 2011.

One year later, the latest edition fixed some of its problems but introduced a crop of jittery, laggy, dysfunctional new ones.

Google didn't just copy Microsoft's broadly licensed platform fixation, its Zune fiasco, and its self-stabbing tablet missteps. It also did something else Microsoft does when it runs out of runway: it made a spectacularly expensive acquisition.

In late 2011, Google dropped an incredible $12.5 billion on Motorola Mobility, which the tech media celebrated as a way for Google to become as savvy as Apple in smartphones and tablets, as "protected" from patent attacks as any mature mobile device vendor, and emboldened in its Google TV initiatives thanks to Motorola's existing set top box business.

They were wrong across the board. Motorola's device savvy was actually so terrible that Google's executives described the company's 18 month product pipeline as something it needed to "drain" as if it were an impacted sewage pipe.

"We've inherited 18 months of pipeline that we actually have to drain right now, while we're actually building the next wave of innovation and product lines," Google's Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette told The Verge.

Motorola's patents have turned out to be so worthless that it's costing Google $14.5 million in additional damages for its role in pursing unscrupulous patent abuse tactics, on top of the $1.7 billion in operating losses Motorola has generated as a rotting albatross around the search giant's neck. And its set top box business was barely worth selling off as scrap.

At least we can agree that Microsoft and Google are trying

It's not common within the tech media to point out the clearly discernible absurdity of what Google and Microsoft are doing as they desperately seek to transition themselves from broadly licensed platform vendors to mobile device companies.

However, it goes without saying why they are trying to do so.

The age of broadly licensed platforms is over. The primary vendors of the world's broadly licensed platforms are all shoveling billions at efforts to turn themselves into an Apple, Inc.

The most interesting takeaway is that the entire world clearly shared a false delusion regarding broadly licensed platforms. That's important to recognize when considering the legitimacy of our remaining dogma. Perhaps we are wrong in other areas as well.