There's been a lot of
speculation about Google's plan to take over your life and make money doing it. Some people have theorized that they'll do this by vertical integration: first by releasing a browser to compete with IE, then a desktop suite to compete with Office and finally an entire operating system. Such an approach would hardly be novel to industry. IBM did it before Microsoft cleaved the OS from the hardware and AOL and Time-Warner did it back when Content was king. Heck, Standard Oil did it a hundred years ago (see also:
Teapot Dome Scandal). The suggestion that Google would enter the PC or OS market leaves a lot of people scratching their heads. Why would Google start selling consumer electronics when the majority of households already own a PC? Why control the (historically free-as-in-beer) browser when you can control every site that the user visits and sell usage statistics and advertising? Why declare war on Microsoft's uber-established Office suite when the next big battle for productivity software will be fought using AJAX? Why make Mom and Dad go through the headache of installing and learning a new operating system? What would Google's gaggle of geniuses be able to contribute to these areas of technology that a bunch of
second-rate engineering school grads couldn't accomplish at less innovative companies? It just doesn't make sense.
The company's well-known and oft-repeated goal is to organize all the world's information, and they still have a long way to go in that respect. If you look at Google's expansion in the last year or two, you'll see that they've managed to grab a large (horizontal) chunk of the world. Blogs, photo galleries, shopping, advertising, email; all of the web's most popular (and for that matter, populist) trends have Google's fingerprints on them. They've been able to enter all of these formerly disconnected areas of technology and demonstrate that, ultimately, they're all problems in information organization and retrieval. Start with a design methodology that celebrates simplicity and usefulness over bells and whistles and combine that with the worlds most powerful backend, and you've got a company that can enter into any emerging Internet trend in a matter of months instead of years.
This plug-and-play company concept can't be an accident, and it may be Google's greatest business secret. Their fun and flexible corporate image allows them to enter unsuspecting markets without upsetting investors. If a project fails, so what? It was only a beta test of an unofficial program started by one of their employees in his spare time. If it takes off, then plug in advertising and watch the cash roll in.
But where does Google go from here? The short answer is: wherever the eyeballs go. The long answer was announced last week at CES. Precious few months after the quiet (I might even say "disappointing") launch of Google Video, Google announced an online video store and an important alliance with CBS. In the time between the original launch of Google Video and last week's sales pitch, Google got the infrastructure in place to
- store and index video files of arbitrary size,
- stream them efficiently and in as platform-independent a way as possible (using Flash, an plug-in which has been ported to every OS and browser where users may need to find out who all their base belong to, play Tetris at work, or shoot a monkey for a chance to win an iPod), and
- implement the long-awaited Google Wallet to charge users for content.
This last point is one of the most overlooked announcements of CES. Until now, almost all of Google's revenue has come from advertising. For the first time, Google will be collecting money directly from consumers. This opens up a whole host of issues for the company. For the first time, they'll have to worry about customer service. It's one thing to have technical support staff in place to explain to an experienced Unix admin how to defrag a drive on a
Google Search Appliance, but it's a whole different can of worms to try to tell my mom why her license for the latest episode of General Hospital expired after 24 hours. Additionally, the growth of relatively unskilled support staff could cause low-grade retardation in a company which is historically full of geniuses. At the very least, it will make Google's organizational structure look a lot more like the companies on the Fortune 500 and a lot less like a novel start-up full of great ideas and looking to change the world.
So it's clear that Google's aims are not at conquering the desktop, but conquering the Internet itself. Of course individuals and corporations will be able to build and host their own sites, but they'll find these sites on Google's search engine, talk to their friends about them using Google Talk and blog about them here on Blogger. No company can control all the content on the Internet, but the company that can control the delivery of the content will be the most successful one. The only way to accomplish that is to be at the forefront of emerging Internet trends. Google has grown so rapidly because they've embraced rapid development, real-world testing and emerging standards.
The battle to control the world's information is only now beginning to heat up. "Real-world" content (movies, music and television) is finally finding its way onto the web and Google is the one company who is positioned to deliver it all, so don't expect them to become a hardware manufacturer any time soon.
