SIVACRACY.NET: Does Google=Internet?

Winner-Take-All: Google and the Third Age of Computing

IBM 1950-1980
Microsoft 1984-1998
Google 2001-

Google has won both the online search and advertising markets. They hold a considerable technological lead, both with algorithms as well as their astonishing web-scale computing platform. Beyond this, however, network effects around their industry position and brand will prevent any competitor from capturing market share from them -- even if it were possible to match their technology platform.

To paraphrase an old comment about IBM, made during its 30 year dominance of the enterprise mainframe market, Google is not your competition, Google is the environment. Online businesses which struggle against this new reality will pay opportunity costs both in online advertising revenue as well as product success.

Competitors such as Yahoo should quickly move to align themselves with this inevitability. Yahoo could add an extra $1.5B to their revenue overnight by conceding monetization to Google and becoming a distribution partner for Adwords, as Ask Jeeves did.

Google is the start page for the Internet

The net isn't a directed graph. It's not a tree. It's a single point labeled G connected to 10 billion destination pages.

If the Internet were a monolithic product, say the work of some alternate-future AT&T that hadn't been broken up, then you'd turn it on and it would have a start page. From there you'd be able to reach all of the destination services, however many there were.

Well, that's how the net has organized itself after all.

From this position, Google derives immense and amazing power. And they make money, but not only for themselves. Google makes advertisers money. Google makes publishers money. Google drives multi-billion dollar industries profiting from Google SEM/SEO.

Most businesses on the net get 70% of their traffic from Google. These business are not competitors with Google, they are its partners, and have an interest in driving Google's success. Google has made partners of us all. ...

There is much more. Please check it out.

Comments

i would think , from the statistics provided, GOOGLE is subject to the same universal forces as are we all. I hope GOOGLE is not the final chapter in the internet saga and somehow imune to these forces. "even the mountains, fall in the sea, eventualy..." Jimi Hendrix...sorry about waxing philosophical

Posted by: bobc | January 5, 2007 08:18 PM

"Google v. Microsoft" can't be far away...

Posted by: Ann Bartow | January 6, 2007 10:27 PM

There was an article in Friday's The Wall Street Journal on Google's inroads to China. The gist of it was that Google faces significant hurdles in foreign markets like China.

Quote: "Yet Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., has had some difficulty extending beyond its dominant English-language search site to sites in other languages around the world, where local competitors are enjoying linguistic and other home-grown advantages.

In China, the world's second-largest Internet market after the U.S., Google is second behind rival Baidu.com Inc. According to iResearch Consulting, Google held a 19.2% share of China's market for Internet searches in the third quarter of 2006, compared with 63.7% for Baidu."

The article found here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116793563237767297-search.html?

Posted by: Jardinero1 | January 7, 2007 11:00 PM

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