What Business is Google In Anyway? June 22, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Companies, Enterprise Mashups, Google, Web 2.0.trackback
If you think the Evil Empire of Redmond works in paranoid ways, consider the case of Google, the undisputed heavyweight champ of next generation web technologies. Seldom has a company become so big and so powerful without explaining to investors exactly why it does what it does and how it plans to make money in the future.
The $64-billion question is: Will Google continue to focus on its core search and keyword-based advertising business or is it gearing up to try to replace Microsoft as the main provider of productivity applications to enterprises and average computer users?
Company executives deny or deflect such speculation but you have to think that it didn't introduce an online word processor, calendar, e-mail manager, instant-messaging program, photo manager, web page creator and, most recently, a spreadsheet just for the heck of it.
The reality is that Google is the only company big enough and Web-dominent enough to challenge Microsoft, not only in the office tool space, but also in the larger goal of transforming the web into a universal OS. Nobody ever bought a Windows machine because they loved the Windows operating system. Most users go with Windows because that is what you need to run Outlook and MS Office and most of the other most-widely used desktop software. Its dominance in office productivity applications made the Windows OS standard and gave Microsoft its so-called network effect.
Perhaps, as a result of being the unchallenged market leader for a very long time Microsoft has become bloated and risk-adverse and its products seem more dated and clunky by the day. We have now reached the point where the quality of office tools available as online applications is approaching parity with Microsoft's Office line. The long-predicted concept that the network is the computer is finally coming true. Google is the company best-positioned to benefit from this profound shift.
And let's face it; an all-out innovation slugfest between Microsoft and its homies and the Google gang would be good for the industry, good for web users, and great fun to watch. It might also save Microsoft from a long and nasty slide into irrelevance.
But, before all this can happen, Google has to decide what it wants to be when it grows up.
GOOG won’t be displacing MSFT in the corporate space anytime soon that’s because corporate IT has no need to change it already pays for the licenses and it runs the software applications on its own iron and in its own glass box. GOOG’s applications don’t have anywhere near that level of security, or, reliability. Still, the consumer space is much larger than the corporate space so GOOG can still get plenty of seats. But yes, which business is Google in? If you look at its mission statement it is to index the world’s information–that’s a far cry from its actual business activities. What’s the point of a mission statement that has become so remote from the business of Google?