Sometimes you run into a video which immediately triggers you. Like the video from Big Think, who interviewed Malcolm Gladwell. Galdwell is a staff writer with The New Yorker and tends to look at things from a different perspective. Which is something which triggers the mind.
In this case he talked about new technologies and he questions whether or not we need the new technologies. It is part of a bigger interview which you can see below. Here is the part where he talks about Google:
As said, this is part of a larger interview from Think Big with Gladwell, you can see that here:
He does make a good point about focus. Maybe sometimes Google is going to far with what they are doing? What are your thoughts on this?
Posted in Interviews | Tags: Google, Interviews, Malcom Gladwell
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I quite like Malcolm Gladwell, though I always get the impression that he dumbs down his writings a bit too much to cater to a bigger audience. I’d love for him to write a book where he doesn’t pull back and where he just goes in to full-tilt academia mode.
On the issue of fixing problems that don’t exist, I’m not sure I entirely agree with him. It’s about fixing problems that we don’t yet realise exist, but that are nonetheless very real problems.
Take for example early search engines like Altavista and Hotbot. When Google arrived on the scene, people suddenly realised that it fixed a problem that until then very few people knew existed: namely that these established search engines sucked.
There are very real information retrieval challenges that face us today, and search engines are optimally positioned to solve them. But more importantly, there are problems out there that we don’t yet know, and whether or not established companies are the ones to solve those is something that’s truly worth debating.