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Yet More Google Gazing
povvell writes "Bob Cringely has joined the club and just set out his personal vision for the future of Google now that it's flush with cash, thereby joining a happy band of Google gazers. But is he right, and are they? My own guess is that the company intends to become the biggest advertising platform in the world. What's yours?"
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Heck, if I can't get an interview, hardly anyone can get an interview.
I am sure Google really wants to have an interview with an asshole that complains of their micromanagement.
I am no Googlelover (as far as their IPO/business practices go) but I don't think it's a bad idea to ignore Cringley.
that I never really thought of Google as a company. For the longest time I was wondering how they were even making enough money to pay their employees.
I thought of them more like "A group of SMFs that wanted to make some neat shit". Which they accomplished.
So with all this money now, its almost as if the impression that I have of Google has died and something else has taken over.
I don't really care what extra things google will do as long as they continue to be a great Internet search engine
I see an excellent point made in the article, which is that the founders want to maintain control of the enterprise as much as they can. The problem is that as soon as you've taken a company public, it isn't your baby anymore. It sounds like decisions need to start being delegated before the founders wear themselves out from working too hard.
I've worked at more than one company where the founder(s) micro-managed the entire enterprise. The did themselves a tremendous disservice in the long run by discouraging independent thought and actions.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
We're talking about Cringley. So, uh, no.
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Whilst I do like Google, I think they need to be very careful about the next few years. There *will* be rivals (Microsoft foremost, of course) in the search-engine space. Ads are one thing, but if people aren't visiting google out of preference for their search engine needs, much of the rest of their business model falls apart.
The hype - almost hysteria at first - surrounding the Google IPO has so much resonance with the dot gone fun of a few years ago, they would do well to look to the future without forgetting the pertinent and still relevant lessons of the past. Just because the stock market thinks you're worth $billions, doesn't mean it'll stay that way, or that you really are worth that much.
Remember Netscape? The parallels are noticeable. Cornered market until MS got there with IE and ownership of the desktop. It's a different political world now though, but it's worth remembering.
And for a company that's historically been very secretive, how will that play out in the publicly listed world?
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
Google does become the biggest advertiser and continues a policy of clean, unobtrusive adverts. not only does this reduce the percentage of annoying adverts directly by market share, but it makes people more sensitive to annoying adverts and eventually the stupid dumbfuck marketers realise the error of their ways and also adopt unobtrusive adverts.
Google uses its money to start buying up real life billboards and dismantling them, thus improving real life too. this turns out to be one of the greatest moves in marketing history and Google continues to prosper.
The company itself was founded on a relatively good concept, which in turn became a very good product.
All of the techies are fascinated with it because they have used it for so long and want to see the company prosper, that is, as long as the product doesn't suffer.
All of the suits are fascinated with it because they want to make tons of $$ by exploiting something they probably didn't know existed until a few months ago.
Everyone else is fascinated with it because the news keeps shoving it down our throats.
It's almost like seeing your favorite "underground"/local band get signed to a major record label, then end up on MTV's TRL. Oh you like their music and are happy they have become successful, but you don't want it to get fucked up by catering to what the suits at the record label (shareholders?) think is best.
How about something more meaningful than 'the biggest marketing company'? How about taking all that money and being the leader among big companies with loads of money by showing that being big and powerful does not need to turn you into a monster.
How about that?
Simpy
The problem with online advertising in its current state is that we, the consumer, do not want or like it.
We do like google. And when google started running little text link adds off to the right, I said "Way to go, google, now you can mage something for all your hard work." A lesser company might have sold "preferred listing" links *COUGH* YAHOO *COUGH* but Google remained honest and our friends.
And now, I see that google's little text links are actually usefull to me. I'm searching for airfare, and google suggests that I try an online airfare that I hadn't tried before. I do and I get a good price! And that place gets my business, and Google gets a few millicents for my click.
As long as google can remain my friend, I hope they do take over all of online advertising. Adds that arent' hideous in some way and actually advertise things I'm interested in will, in my eyes, revolutanize the online world.
Way to go Google.
Here's the trend I see of lots of Kleiner companies like Sun, Compaq, AOL, Netscape, Electronic Arts, and yes, Google.
The begin with lots of top-talent in lots of areas - academic, practical, financial, etc. Eventually they do very well (Sun, Netsape and AOL come to mind as the examples most familiar to /.); and some of the bright peole move on - some to start their own things, some to retire, or get promoted to management. Whatever the reason, most (notable exceptions, electroninc arts, genentech) fade after a while; IMHO because the best people moved on.
Then KPCB'll invest in those best people's next venture that will once again take on Microsoft in the next hot area of High Tech.
IMHO it never was Netscape vs MSFT, or Sun vs MSFT or AOL vs MSFT -- it's always been KPCB vs MSFT; with Sun, NSCP, AOL, Google just minor divisions of KPCB's virtual company bound together by a common culture of great innovation.
If the people at Google know what's good for them, and a suspect they might, they will keep their search engine clean and fast. Refineing it such that it stays on top. No more wading though countless newsgroup posts to find what your really looking for. Or a better way to refine searches that do hit things like newsgroups.
After that they can branch out and play in the market. Gmail is one such venture and there are others that are worth a stab at such as the peoplefinder thing that I don't remember off the top of my head right now what it's called but it's been a pet project for a while now. Other things such as Froogle seem to be worthy of more development.
However key to all the fishing they might want to do they have to keep that main engine humming. Do no evil! Keep the respect of the geeks and lusers alike. Computers move fast and the internet moves even faster and once you slip it's very hard to go back.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Not really. The buyout would still have to be approved by Google executives and shareholders, the only reason they would approve that is if Microsoft offered more than the mid-term market value of the stock which Microsoft is not likely to do especially at these prices.
Part of the reason google is so sucessful is because they DON'T use the model you are talking about. It isn't as simple as 'more ads == more money.' If the quality of the service is hurt by attempts to make a profit, it will drive away the users, which will drive away customers (advertisers won't pay for all those ads unless somebody actually _looks_ at them). It is pretty hard to make a profit with no customers.
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Crudely Drawn Games
The fascination with google is simple. In today's broken capitalist economy it is very hard to get ahead. The biggest most powerful corporations are those that do "evil" and use lots of advertising and lies to get ahead. Google is the first company to hit it big in a long time in the true Adam Smith capitalist sense. They made the best product, they did right by the customer and they have a policy of "no evil". People voted with their dollars and now google is on top. If only the same thing happened in all markets and not just web search engines we might live in a much better place.
Imagine if your car was as good at being a car as google is at being a search engine. Imagine if the tv channels and radio stations you watched had a similar advertising policy to googles.
Google is fascinating because it proves you can get ahead without underhanded business tactics, coercion and lies. You can just make a product that is better than everyone elses, quality wise, and that's enough.
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It seems that, while ad revenue has made Google what it is, ad revenue can not be the company's only source of income forever. They have to expand into other areas. Everything they do seems to be based on the expansion of their ad revenue (i.e. - GMail, Froogle, etc.). They also bought they recently bought Picasa, so where else will they expand and how will they make money doing it?
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If the rumors of Google's 100,000 servers and proprietary grid/cluster OS are true, then what I think would make the most sense for Google is to offer free access worldwide to their supermachine from any standard computer or through special terminals. Google could essentially be the next OS: virtually unlimited storage, bandwidth, and information at your fingertips from anywhere in the world. People could log-in from anywhere in the world and have access to vast resources for running applications remotely, instantly searching and sorting all your files, or managing your personal email or other information. And all you have to do is put up with a couple of unobtrusive text-based ads, or pay the low, low subscription fee of $29.99/month.
Information about consumer habits and desires drives product development. Knowledge is power, and many companies are driven by marketing initiatives. In other words, marketers determine the need and direct product development.
Credit cards provide a useful way to track consumers and build files on their habits. Other electronic cards (club card memberships, air miles, etc.) provide similar ways to gather consumer information. The companies that gather this information then sell it out to other marketing firms.
It's safe to say that Google is an internet search used by everyone. This means they have some of the most valuable information for a consumer world. They could easily make billions packaging this data properly and selling it to marketing firms.
How much of your time do you spend searching anyway?
I think they will buy Sun, who has a different set of strengths in high-end computing (customer contacts).
This is made more likely because of the personal connections between the companies, including having the same investors, whose portfolio companies often help each other long after they're small (remember AOL,NSCP), and recieved their seed money from Andy Bechtolsheim one of the founders of Sun Microsystems .
If they're so successful, why the need to go public?
As the shareholders get more and more say, they'll try to make it as simple as "more ads == more money". That's the road Yahoo went down, well that and the silly "internet portal" thing.
You're right. It is pretty hard to make a profit with no customers. That's when you haul out the lawyers like Netscape, Sun or SCO.
They all turned to litigation as a source of revenue, whether they sued MS or linux users is pretty much irrelevant.
I'd like to see Google stay the way it is, and simply improve incrementally as it has been doing.. But I'm afraid the writings on the wall.
They got a whole new rulebook. If they want to keep the war chest full, they have to make investors happy, and investors may not share the founders world view.
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Unfortunately I think Google has been getting worse at its primary function, finding relevant webpages based on simple queries, for years. I remember back in 1999 when i 1st discovered Google. The results at Altavista were littered with spurious results, and I usually had to use long boolean searches to get decent results-- usually on the 3rd try and the 4th page of results. Google came along and blew that all away, and there was 1 big reason-- no one was trying to SPAM Google's results, and I doubt anyone even knew how.
Fast forward 5 years. So many SEO types are now infiltrating Google's results that they are not nearly as relevant as they once were-- remember when Google was sued for downgrading linkfarm results, and they backed down? Anyone use the "Feeling luck?" button anymore? It's nice you can see 100 results per page, but I usually end up doing 2 or 3 queries to get the proper result these days. I still use Google, but Teoma (Ask.com, I believe) seems to work equally as well, and if Google doesn't improve their search results, they will have a long, slow decline.
Their other innovations are nice (Froogle, Google News, GMail), but they are really just sidelights to their core competency-- finding relevant webpages. I'm hoping they figure out how to do it.
Isn't it funny how, in the dot-com boom of the roaring 90's, "disintermediation" was the buzzword for the phenomenon that was going to make everyone super rich? Cut out the middleman, allow shoppers to directly access your site, and watch the dough roll in.
:)
And isn't it great how the most successful web businesses, like Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and Google, are all busy making money through "intermediation", acting as the middleman who points buyers to sellers, and making money by selling ad space and transaction fees?
I love it when a plan comes together
Why in the world would Google buy Sun? Google does not want to sell hardware or Java. Google's data centers run el-cheapo commodity x86 servers. And Sun is not even profitable.
cpeterso
The AC is absolutely correct. Buying their way in is absolutely the Microsoft way. However, this is more a revision of the grandparent's point than a refutation. Once in, Microsoft simply abuses their market share in other areas until they bury the competition. They do not buy out competitors. They only buy to get a foothold in that market. Then they outsource (recently offshore but traditionally in the US) improvements to that software.
Another aspect of Microsoft: they team up with a company to develop an extension to their current software then dump the partner. Both Roxio and Citrix fell for this.
Microsoft probably would buy out the competition but for those pesky anti-trust laws.
Google is fascinating because it proves you can get ahead without underhanded business tactics, coercion and lies. You can just make a product that is better than everyone elses, quality wise, and that's enough.
Well, at least as far as we know about.
There's been enough shills and shysters along the way (Sunbeam and the exec who was known as either the axe-man or the fixxer-upper dude) that it's best to wait and see for a few years before annointing them saints. Wal*Mart used to have a good corporate image as well, but I refuse to buy from them unless they're the *only* place where I can get product X. (Happened once last year.)
So far, Google looks clean... if they still are clean 5 or 10 years from now, I'll agree that they are truly a company to be admired.
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