NYT: "The rapidly escalating cost of doing business is driving out bookstores, threatening the city’s sense of self as the center of the literary universe, the home of the publishing industry and a place that lures and nurtures authors and avid readers."#

Why? #

Mike Arrington says he's pretty sure Google read an email to discover who his source was on a leak from within Google. #

Google denies it, but the denial is weak. "While our terms of service might legally permit such access, we have never done this and it’s hard for me to imagine circumstances where we would investigate a leak in that way."#

So what have we learned?#

1. Their terms of service allow them to read your email.#

2. This specific lawyer lacks imagination.#

3. What is it they have never done? If they didn't do exactly what Arrington alleges, he's not lying.#

Now consider how little regard Google had for its own employees in this classic exchange between then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Apple CEO, Steve Jobs. If they have such disdain for their own employees, how much regard do you think they have for users? My guess is, if they want to read your email, they're reading your email, and that's that. Every time you write something in GMail, pretend that Larry and Sergey are discussing it with their lawyers at their next staff meeting.#

Someday Google is going to realize this kind of disdain hurts them financially. Their product is trust. They're throwing it away, almost deliberately, as if to make a point, it seems.#

They'd do well to study the Johnson & Johnson example for how they managed a crisis with Tylenol. In that case, of course -- J&J had nothing to do with the underlying problem. But they embraced it, fully adopted the user's point of view, and kept their product alive. #

1. It's really cool technology.#

2. If it works, it will be a space that humans occupy, like hard drives on Macs and PCs, and Facebook profiles on cell phones. This purchase is not specifically related to the product we think of as Facebook today. Today's Facebook is like search is to Google, or MS-DOS was to Microsoft. Facebook is so big, its ambition has to be big to match it.#

3. Zuck wants to bring the Internet to the next billion people -- why? Because everyone in the first billion is already a user of his network. My guess is that the next group will neither be easy to convert or as lucrative. If they want growth it'll have to come from elsewhere.#

4. Oculus is Google Glass that's fun and works. And not as creepy. #

5. Oculus is the X-box of the future. #

6. It's 3D that really works. #

7. It's the movie theater of the future.#

8. Zuck is of the generation that grew up with game consoles. He wants to be the first user of Oculus the same way people of my generation would have wanted to be the first user of Marantz. (Look it up.)#

9. If you can't buy the coolest game platform for $2 billion, what's the point of having all that money. #