Monthly Archives: August 2015

New “Alphabet” Name Shows How Presumptive (And Good) Google Might Be

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Attribution and All Photo Illustration Credits: The Guardian

“Alphabet” Presumes A Lot
It’s hard to imagine naming your company “Planet Earth”, or “Universe” or “Everything Under The Sun”, but Google comes pretty close.  In recent corporate re-structuring hailed (temporarily) by Wall Street, Google restructured and re-named itself “Alphabet” to bring all its disparate companies under one roof.  From its core search and advertising business that underwrites it all, to energy, to curing cancer, to driver-less cars, to web-enabled eyeglasses, Alphabet now enlists “moonshot” projects along with what everybody knows Google best for: search.

Laudable Missions
Google’s missions are laudable and reflect worthy passions among its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brinn. After all, besides moonshot pioneer Elan Musk, few executives of publicly held web companies do not often stray too far from stockholders’ collective wishes: core business.

“Banal Search”
According to The Guardian’s Evgeny Morozov, in his August 16, 2015 piece, “Google may have changed its name but the game remains the same”, the company is simply temporarily righting its troubles with investors. Morozov writes that Page and Brinn aspire well beyond “banal search” and the advertising that supports it.

“Alphabet – a nice example of corporate plastic surgery at work – makes explicit what everybody has known for a while,” Morozov writes. “Google’s founders are tired of and deeply embarrassed by the company’s core business. Selling ads, after all, is not a business that requires a PhD from Stanford or MIT – in fact, it’s so mind-numbingly banal and inelegant that all those brainy scientists on Google’s payroll must have an identity crisis every time they realise how their moonshot projects are actually financed.”

Google/Alphabet Does Good Work, No Matter What
Page and Brynn revolutionized search and have established Google — that is, Alphabet — as the undisputed data Goliath of our digital times. The very verb “to Google,” now means “to search” for mostly all of us. And the business pair are serial (and I would argue “benevolent”) entrepreneurs at the highest levels with their work outside search. So even if Morozov and others consider the re-naming of Google a deft attempt to boost Wall Street stock, so be it.

Greg Goaley, President of WinCommunications in Des Moines, Iowa, is a former copywriter and creative editor, and a 25-year digital content strategist and provider. Kathryn Towner is President of WinM@il USA, a former 15-year sales rep for Random House/McGraw-Hill, and a 20-year permission-based email publications consultant and provider.

Cable Unbundling Thankfully Continues, As Do Pitfalls

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Attribution and All Photo Credits: Gannett Corporation

More on ESPN’s Woes Due To Cable Unbundling: Andrew Logue’s August 12, 2015 Des Moines Register Piece, “Cable unbundling makes college power brokers uneasy”.

ESPN Still Widely Watched & Loved
Like tens or even hundreds of millions of viewers in this country and around the world, I love ESPN and always have. The network has covered historic games and matches; has uncovered countless numbers of stories, athletes and teams around the country since the early 1980s; and has driven greater sports media from other providers, while introducing us to great American sports communities like no media before.

Ways of Watching ESPN Evolving
ESPN came to us only through cable television for its first 25 years or so, but with the advent of web streaming for at least a decade, viewers have subscribed to EPSN’s wide variety of sports web channels, or have simply put up with cable costs sometimes five times the cost to subscribe to widening digital ESPN and many other web streaming choices, what the industry calls “over the top” services, like Netflix, Hulu and HBO.

Why Is ESPN So Important?
As viewers flocked to ESPN over the years, cable companies used the very popular ESPN as a battering ram to gain and retain viewers to continue paying the cable monster.  Cable companies — awash for decades in subscriber money while still enjoying revenues from commercials, which subscribers are forced to watch, although we already pay for cable! — provided some other popular content (examples include Comedy Central, Disney and Fox channels among them). But beyond these rare good channels, the rest have been what many Americans might politely describe as crap. Thus, the flood to find cheaper and better web streaming alternatives.

Current Cable Unbundling Trends Put ESPN At Risk
ESPN has reportedly lost more than three million cable subscribers in a little over a year, and its parent company Disney has demanded deep cuts into ESPN’s budget for 2016 and 2017.  Current web streaming is gutting the cable industry, the same industry that brought ESPN to all of us many years ago. And given ever-widening digital alternatives, no signs indicate this trend will change.

Greg Goaley, President of WinCommunications in Des Moines, Iowa, is a former copywriter and creative editor, and a 25-year digital content strategist and provider. Kathryn Towner is President of WinM@il USA, a former 15-year sales rep for Random House/McGraw-Hill, and a 20-year permission-based email publications consultant and provider.