Currently, Google gets 4 out of every 10 advertising dollars on the internet. At its peak, JP Rockefeller's Standard Oil controlled 90% of its market. So needless to stay, Sergey Brin and Larry Page need to step up their act before I start calling them robber-barons. I mean, it could be sort of cool if they did. They'd probably feel guilty towards the end of their lives for invading millions of people's privacy by scanning their e-mails to optimize Ad relevance (got a lot of good Spam recipes though). Then, we would all go to Silicon Valley during the holidays to ice skate at Brin Center in front of the Christmas Sequoia before seeing Handel's Messiah at Page Palladium, the world class concert hall (Thank you, death bed philanthropy!)
The scary thing is, (at least, if you don't like the prospect of a Big Brother-type overlord (I personally would enjoy an age appropriate forced exercise session every morning. And yes, this is a dreaded double parenthetical. Fuck you, English language. I hope Google optimizes you, too.)
Google is set up well to capitalize on future technology trends and experience even greater growth than it already has.
Loot at the interview with NY Times tech columnist David Pogue on NewsHouse (nice work, Doxtad.) Ubiquitous Wi-Fi is coming down the pipeline. Smartphone/laptop hybrids are the focus of most innovation. People are going to be finishing presentations in the cab and sending it to the company server system, which is now part of some 0nline cloud-computing host program run by Google. File hosting fees will be a huge source of future Google revenue.
Also like Mr. Doxtad, I'm not concerned that Google is working its way into the mobile phone market. That entire segment of the telecom industry is a boondoggle. Verizon has a nice network but authoritarian contract policies. AT&T has the iPhone, but will soon lose it once Apple realizes that network upgrades were not as good as AT&T promised. Sprint, Nextel, Cingular...yeah, real scared.
Setting up the Android as an open-source OS was savvy and proof that Brin and Page still have some mojo going on the other side of 30. App creation and innovation on the iPhone has happened at a blistering pace. It will happen even quicker with Android. And remember, developing countries have skipped landlines and gone straight to mobile networks in developing their infrastructures. How do you say Google in Swahili?
Google is set up to succeed, and society is all the better for it.
Tom
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I couldn't agree more -- Google is a language in my eyes.
ReplyDeleteGoogle embodies the word technology in so many ways. Just like any online heavy weight -- Google being the super-heavy weight -- the company will pool it's resources to invent, reinvent and multiply an idea, at put it at the forefront of the web.
Here is a great analogy I thought of for Google's ideas -- a professor I had used to always use this example: Google's concepts are like those little toy dinosaurs you buy when your kid. They start off really small, but as soon as you add them to cup of water, they grow, and grow, and grow, until they are too large for the cup.
Anything Google works with has this same effect -- it will start off small, but get bigger and bigger until its huge.
I see your points about Google's advancement being a plus, for itself, technology and society at large. However, I'm still left wondering where these guys get off comparing themselves to a superpower (I don't want to bring religion in, so I'll stick with that term). I personally dread the day (if it ever happens) that any entity takes on the role of "Big Brother." I'll wipe my ass in private, thank you.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think Google will begin to crumble before this happens, as it learns the elementary lesson: Learn when to say no. Right now, the company and its heads, are portraying themselves as money- and fame-hungry giants looking to take on and acquire anything that crosses their paths (in a bigger and better way). Without a strong, well thought-out foundation, eventually cracks will begin to suface.
S