One of the interesting (though increasingly tedious) parts about being a long-term technology analyst is seeing the same mistakes made over and over again. A young upstart company that is doing very well looks at a more mature firm and figures they can do it better — without first understanding what it is that made the older firm successful.
In the current case it is Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), which I’m increasingly seeing as a company that has set its mind on spectacular failure. The area in question: EMC (NYSE: EMC) and the concept of cloud computing, and whether it should be public or private. The irony is that Google is probably the most private company in technology at the moment ‚Äî the firm once threatened to blacklist CNET for using Google’s own search engine to collect information on its CEO.
