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Peak Google: The Company's Time At the Top May Be Nearing Its End
HughPickens.com writes Farhad Manjoo writes at the NYT that at first glance Google looks plenty healthy, but growth in Google's primary business, search advertising, has flattened out at about 20 percent a year for the last few years. Although Google has spent considerable resources inventing technologies for the future, it has failed to turn many of its innovations into new moneymakers. According to Manjoo, as smartphones eclipse laptop and desktop computers to become the planet's most important computing devices, the digital ad business is rapidly changing and Facebook, Google's archrival for advertising dollars, has been quick to profit from the shift. Here's why: The advertising business is split, roughly, into two. On one side are direct-response ads meant to induce an immediate purchase: Think classifieds, the Yellow Pages, catalogs or Google's own text-based ads running alongside its search results. But the bulk of the ad industry is devoted to something called brand ads, the ads you see on television and print magazines that work on your emotions in the belief that, in time, your dollars will follow. "Google doesn't create immersive experiences that you get lost in," says Ben Thompson. "Google creates transactional services. You go to Google to search, or for maps, or with something else in mind. And those are the types of ads they have. But brand advertising isn't about that kind of destination. It's about an experience." According to Thompson the future of online advertising looks increasingly like the business of television and is likely to be dominated by services like Facebook, Snapchat or Pinterest that keep people engaged for long periods of time and whose ads are proving to be massively more effective and engaging than banner advertisements.
In less than five years, Facebook has also built an enviable ad-technology infrastructure, a huge sales team that aims to persuade marketers of the benefits of Facebook ads over TV ads, and new ways for brands to measure how well their ads are doing. These efforts have paid off quickly: In 2014 Facebook sold $11.5 billion in ads, up 65 percent over 2013. Google will still make a lot of money if it doesn't dominate online ads the way it does now. But it will need to find other businesses to keep growing. This is why Google is spending on projects like a self-driving car, Google Glass, fiber-optic lines in American cities, space exploration, and other audacious innovations that have a slim chance of succeeding but might revolutionize the world if they do. But the far-out projects remind Thompson of Microsoft, which has also invested heavily in research and development, and has seen little return on its investments. "To me the Microsoft comparison can't be more clear. This is the price of being so successful — what you're seeing is that when a company becomes dominant, its dominance precludes it from dominating the next thing. It's almost like a natural law of business."
In less than five years, Facebook has also built an enviable ad-technology infrastructure, a huge sales team that aims to persuade marketers of the benefits of Facebook ads over TV ads, and new ways for brands to measure how well their ads are doing. These efforts have paid off quickly: In 2014 Facebook sold $11.5 billion in ads, up 65 percent over 2013. Google will still make a lot of money if it doesn't dominate online ads the way it does now. But it will need to find other businesses to keep growing. This is why Google is spending on projects like a self-driving car, Google Glass, fiber-optic lines in American cities, space exploration, and other audacious innovations that have a slim chance of succeeding but might revolutionize the world if they do. But the far-out projects remind Thompson of Microsoft, which has also invested heavily in research and development, and has seen little return on its investments. "To me the Microsoft comparison can't be more clear. This is the price of being so successful — what you're seeing is that when a company becomes dominant, its dominance precludes it from dominating the next thing. It's almost like a natural law of business."
The attitude of TFA is what investors felt for some time, until their latest conference call, when they put everyone's fears at ease and said, "Hey there is a method to this and this is it right here."
So no, Google isn't going anywhere.
I've become increasingly impressed with Duck Duck Go. At first I rarely used them because they didn't have predictive results, image search, etc. But now they do have all that stuff and I used them as my default. The only things I still need to jump back to Google for is the latest news and most recent articles. If something's happening on the web RIGHT NOW, Google is still the better search engine for it. But for most of the searching I do, stuff happening RIGHT NOW isn't that important. However if your job depends on top efficiency internet searches, I'm sure Google is still king.
I'll agree that Google's ads don't work on my emotions. Other advertising on the web, the kind that load up giant flash videos that cause my browser to hang for 30 seconds, play unwanted audio, obscure the content I'm trying to read, and otherwise ruin my browsing experience - those types of advertising definitely do hit me at an emotional level, but I'm not sure it's the type of emotion the advertiser wants from me. It's the kind of emotion that makes me run adblock so I don't have to deal with them anymore. I think I prefer Google's far less emotional ads.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
That, and their search engine is still the best around. By a long shot. Many times you don't even have to visit the pages it links to, and Google will simply give you an answer with before having to look at any of the results. When Firefox went and switch my search engine to Yahoo, I noticed by the quality of the results, not by the look of the page, because they were very careful to try to make the results page look as similar as possible.
Agreed Google still has the best search engine. I hate when 3rd parties try to sneak their search engines onto my PC or phone. However, I don't mind Bing terribly as a search engine, but I seem to get more relevant results with Google.
FWIW, Bing's mapping is definitely better than Google's though. In particular the birdseye angled aerial images are awesome and allow you to see all four sides of structure, instead just a roof, with surprisingly good resolution too. I regularly inspect properties for work, and I use Bing's map tools to scope them out before I see them in person.
The parallels drawn in TFA between Peak Google and Peak Microsoft/Peak IBM are thought-provoking and relevant.
Nothing, no creature in nature or multinational juggernaut stays at the top forever... talking to you dinosaurs, US Steel and General Motors.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The only companies that seemed to have actually died have been Slashdot poster children - Novell and Sun for instance.
Novell was already a has-been by the time Slashdot became a thing. Many of us predicted Sun's failure when one of their Ultrasparc refreshes had to be abandoned because they took too long to bring it out and it would have been old and slow by the time it hit the market if they had bothered to finish, and they followed this up with a long string of pointless acquisitions which they in turn followed up by laying off literally all the talent every time they bought someone.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Instead, the findings show that people react to ads on Facebook in the same way they respond to ads on television.
What do people do when TV commercials are on? Go to the bathroom, wash the dishes, surf other channels ...
Eye-tracking studies have shown that people have also become ad-blind. We've seen that inserting "add-ish" content into a page (sort of like a slashvertisement) doesn't really work.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.