No Surprise Here – Portland’s Not Going to Get Google Fiber

“The rumors surrounding Google’s plan to provide fiber Internet in several U.S. cities were true: the company is putting the expansion of the plan on ice, cutting jobs and losing its chief executive in the process.” -MIT Technology Review October 26, 2016

Our CEO *Ethan Dunham predicted this would happen when he first heard about Google’s overtures made to the City of Portland, Oregon over 2 years ago.

You might think he’s clairvoyant – but there are some good reasons he predicted this.

According to Ethan:

• Remember Google is an advertising company. 95% of their top line revenue comes from selling advertising.  So unless a business initiative drives ad revenue, it will eventually get cut.
• About 10 years ago Ethan was at a friend’s party and met a young woman who had recently graduated from Harvard and was working for a very new startup in the Bay Area – named Google.  At the time he had not even heard of Google.   During a conversation, the new Google employee said that she was hired as an engineer, but on a day to day basis spent most of our energy  “organizing the boys.” She said the top managers all had difficulty just doing the things running a business requires, like staff meetings, policy development, project management, etc. They were often brainstorming about new ideas, instead.
• Ethan watched a seminar on C-Span in 2013 that had Adrianne Huffington of the Huffington Post founder, a senior scientist from Google, and a senior technology journalist from CBS. When asked by the moderator what would be the ‘next big thing’ in their industry – Ms. Huffington said the transition of print to digital media, the CBS journalist said the transition to on-demand content, the Google scientist says – and I quote “Interplanetary Travel.”!!
• Finally, Ethan has volunteered for several years in local government public/private. He understands what it takes for a business to work successfully with government agencies. A company like Google, which appears to have serious corporate attention deficit, just simply cannot stay focused long enough to work government institutions.

You can read more about Google folding this branch here. Interested in discussing more tech trends and hearing related predictions from Ethan? Contact Upward Technology today!

*Editorial note from Communications Director Noah Dunham: Although I’ve had to sit through many a conversation in which Ethan has pontificated upon why Google would be a terrible Internet Service Provider, I must confess it is almost eerie how often he can predict results such as the tech giant downsizing its fiber plan. He also called Netflix Streaming. Before Netflix was ever even in business. But that’s another story…