Google Has Competition: Little Outfit? Nah, a Country-Linked Company
February 11, 2022
For many years, my personal view of Google is that it has operated as a nation state. I have pointed out in my essays and lectures that Google lacks only an army. I suppose if the online advertising company needed a kinetic arm, the Wagner Group would be available.
Due to its perception of itself as a servant of its users (regular people, companies, and governmental entitites), Google has mostly operated with the spirit of the American Wild West. You know. Shooting buffalo from trains, doing the treaty bait-and-switch, and doing what was necessary to capture mother lodes.
I read “TikTok Takes on YouTube with 10-Minute Videos – But Will People Watch?” The write up states:
10-minute videos may be a stretch. We’re getting perilously close to the range of a web movie or TV show. The 2003 series Star Wars: The Clone Wars is a good example here, where episodes could range between three and twelve minutes. To be fair, we rather enjoyed that series. With the new 10-minute-range, TikTok could start bringing more episodic series to the platform. In the near term, though, TikTok’s new competitor is clearly YouTube, a platform that’s already attracting some TikTok creators anxious for more time on the digital stage. TikTok creeping in on YouTube territory can now upload videos up to 10 minutes long.
My thought was that Google has some competition, and that competition not only can make rules like Google, deal in high value transactions with few limitations, and has a loyal (witting and unwitting) “community” of billions.
If anyone can make Google feel a bit of competitive pressue, it may be the China-linked TikTok outfit. If TikTok is successful in nibbling on the big toe of Google, that in video eCommerce might catch the increasingly unreliable delivery king nervous as well.
Is it a good idea to have a company so large that only a real nation state can mount a challenge to the outfit which once said it would try to solve death? By the way, how it that going?
Stephen E Arnold, March 15, 2022
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