Lazy Money

The Trifecta
GoogleGoogle is one of our age's great productivity tools. It's also one of our age's great counterproductivity tools. It's simply too easy—and too tempting—to use the search algorithms to shirk the task at hand and look up your sister-in-law's 10K results, the number of times your book has been mentioned in the past two weeks, what your high school prom date is doing. Every time you waste time thusly, Google profits. In recent years Google has aggressively moved to corner the procrastination market by acquiring Doubleclick, which serves up ads when surfers log on to sites, and by buying the ne plus ultra of procrastination: YouTube. Endlessly entertaining and best used at work, where broadband connections allow for trouble-free downloads, YouTube has replaced television as the most reliable source of nonedifying, time-consuming daytime viewing activity.

B-to-B play
AkamaiHere's one of the central contradictions of the procrastination economy: as Web surfers waste time by poking around the furthest reaches of the Internet, they don't like to waste time. When Web sites are slow to load, when video seems to buffer endlessly without playing, these are the times that try souls. And businesses know this. So they turn to Akamai, the company whose "services enable enterprises, government agencies, and Web-centric businesses to deliver content and applications faster, overcome infrastructure obstacles, accelerate online initiatives, and minimize cost." Translation: it helps procrastinators load their sudoku games faster.

© 2008