Ah, Now We Are Really Beyond Search
August 4, 2010
I love it when Fortune Magazine makes a brilliant business breakthrough. I don’t mean record setting revenues or surging subscriptions. Nope. I refer to Fortune’s article “Google: The Search Party Is Over.” The London newspapers have been nibbling on this dog bone for a year or so. The entire publishing industry has been howling in their kennels when it realized that Google was sucking money from ads and providing a road map for other tech-savvy entrepreneurs to exploit the traditional information industry. In my “domains collide” essays and talks, I pointed out that upstarts like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google were pulling meta-plays, leaving those engrossed in checkers at the mercy of the 3-D chess players. The strategy for linear tactics allowed a number of multi-billion dollar outfits to poke their noses into a lousy financial climate. To make matters worse, the children of the “media establishment” were embracing the upstarts’ methods, not mommy and daddy’s.
What makes the Fortune article fascinating is that Fortune is now asserting that the miserable Googlers are going to face some tough sledding. The examples on offer range from Facebook (which is more like Google than most New Yorkers care to admit) to the New Age Apple. I mean black T shirts and blue jeans! Gasp. None of that in the Yacht Club on 44th, thank you.
Please, read the original. Get it on paper if you can. That will provide a gentle stroke to the money people at Time Warner. Who cares about that environmental, eco-thing. I used to work in Manhattan. Once you cross the river into New Jersey, who cares about the rest of the world, right?
Here’s a passage that caught my attention:
Amazingly, Google’s biggest and most promising opportunity to date, its successful Android operating platform for mobile phones, doesn’t produce much revenue or profit for Google — by design. The company in 2007 made the technology available to all comers in a bid to make the web more accessible on smartphones and in turn to encourage consumers to do more Google searches on their mobile devices. The strategy worked. Encouraged by this easy access to Android, handset makers began churning out multimedia phones, and the Android platform has been a consumer success: Google says some 160,000 new Android devices are activated each day, and device makers from Motorola (MOT) to HTC have all released popular phones on the Android platform. But Google doesn’t make gobs of money on those devices. (Google dabbled in phones but discontinued its Nexus One after only six months.) Apple, on the other hand, also stoked the smartphone market with its iOS, but with very different financial results: Last year the company posted an estimated $15 billion in iPhone sales, a benefit of making the hardware and the software.
There are four issues in this addled goose mind about the Fortune analysis:
First, Google has momentum. Just like Microsoft, complaining is not likely to stop the revenue flow. Sure the Web is “ever changing” – unlike the magazine business/ As a result, in course corrections are easier and the Google will make them. Will each adjustment be a home run? Nope. Will these modifications keep the company on track? In my opinion, yep.
Second, the problems Google faces plague its competitors and the many Xooglers in these companies. The legal hassles are just beginning, and I think that Google has been able to pull a Ronald Reagan. Some of its competitors won’t be so lucky. A single Microsoft-style anti-trust decision can trigger some interesting changes without much warning.
Third, the companies that are winning are increasingly monopolistic. A single problem within these constructs can have unexpected consequences. For example, as wonderful as Amazon and Apple are, both find themselves heading for a head on collision with regard to digital content. When monopolies collide, the impact will be quicker and more severe than when new methods of performing certain work intersect. In short, I see upheavals ahead. Big upheavals.
Finally, the problems at Google began in the pre-IPO period from 2002 to 2004. The Google got caught with its paw in the Yahoo-Overture-GoTo advertising method cookie jar. In 2006, Google was at its peak. The company could do no wrong. But after 2006, the company’s “culture” began to shift and the firm became careless. Betas were no longer tests; betas were outright mistakes. From the little known Web Accelerator tizzy to the spectacular Buzz flop, the caution signal was activated in late 2006. Hmmm. four years ago.
We’ve been beyond search for several years. In fact it is going on five years since I wrote in Searcher Magazine that search was dead. Slow reaction time works on Sixth Avenue. Doesn’t work in Harrod’s Creek.
Stephen E Arnold, August 4, 2010
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One Response to “Ah, Now We Are Really Beyond Search”
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lol – You have to know it’s true if Fortune say it is. Thank you Stephen for the laugh that made my day. As an inventor and evangelist of a new search paradigm (especially in the enterprise) there is hope that I will get my invention to the marketplace generating revenue and out again before Fortune, Gartner, Forbes and Cap Gemini even realize I’ve been there.
Thanks again.
John O’