I just finished listening to my most recent audio CD from Perry Marshall as part of my membership to his Renaissance Club (Membership is $29.95 a month and you get a bunch of great stuff thrown in when you sign up plus a monthly hardcopy marketing newsletter and audio CDs in the mail – see here for details).
The audio featured an interview with Stephen Arnold, a “Technology Analyst”. This guy is like a treasure trove of news about Internet companies. I don’t know how he keeps up with it all but he sure sounded off some interesting and very current commentary about the big boys – Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.
He discussed internal situations at all three companies and looked at how Google has a competitive advantage because it’s technology infrastructure is so cheap to create. Yet its technology could potentially be an Achilles heel if something ever goes wrong with it and the Google engineers can’t figure out what’s causing the problem because of how distributed their network is (a clustered infrastructure).
Perry and Stephen covered click fraud, what Google is planning for the future, why Google replicating Microsoft Office is not really “that important” because there are much bigger things at stake based on where Google is heading. They looked at advertising models on the web, how Google’s structure is full of geeks while at the other big web firms the geeks are the minority and the suits are the majority, and a whole host of other technology topics. It was a pretty cool listen for an technology geek like myself.
Google Own Economy
What really grabbed my attention was Stephen’s discussion of the potential future situation where Google operates a successful payments system (Google Wallet – Google’s answer to Paypal), Google Base (an online global marketplace – Google’s answer to Craiglist) and Google AdWords, and how all these systems could integrate together.
He painted a fictional scenario where a seller has an item that has little value in the USA but can garner a $100 price tag from a person in Sweden through Google Base. Upon making the sale Google asks the seller what they want to do with the cash – deposit it into their bank account, transfer the funds to AdWords credit or divide it into multiple purposes.
Google essentially becomes the one stop shop of online commerce even more so than it is now. It controls the financial services (flow of funds) and the marketplace (buyers, sellers, advertisers, publishers). No company in history has ever had that much control. Stephen stated that Google isn’t there yet but if it does happen the situation means one company will be very powerful but, hopefully, everyone wins and the whole process becomes quite seamless. Does power corrupt – we will have to wait and see!
I’m a huge fan of pondering the future of technology so I thoroughly enjoyed this CD. Did any of you other Renaissance Members have a listen to it? (I know there are a few who have joined up via this blog – at least 20).
Why would we think google has the power to be the one stop shop? I mean eBay already has the marketplace, the payment service, and skype.
In my opinion Google really isn’t all that innovative outside of search, and even their search technology is really lacking lately. I think Google gained popularity at a time where it was cool to have a cluttered portal… they went minimalist.. than capitalized on that with their ads… but all the other google products are really not that interesting — I wish Google woudl go back to private holdings… and focus on developping furhter the technology of search…instead of trying to expand its products mix in order to satisfy stock holders
Google never stop producing good products ands services, and although I’m all for technological advancement for the good of the people, the one thing I can’t abide by is global domination and monopolies. I don’t think Google really listens to well to the world as their ‘secrecy’ policies seem to get the backs up of many folks including their shareholders.
How many times do we hear things like: Google has done this and Google is going to do that, but always ending in ‘But no one really knows for sure?’
I can already see that the company has a bit of a reputation of being market place bullies, and this can only get worse if they continue to dominate. Let’s hope at some point in time that they will get some ‘serious’ competition in all their chosen areas, then, and only then, will we have a fair and balanced virtual marketplace.
Aitch
See recent ebay analysist presentation
wow.. that is super cool re: skype/paypal integration. Thanks for the link!
just found this interesting page on Google products
I think Google is awesome but it does worry me some times what a lock on the search market they have. Yahoo! may have 20% of the search market compared with Google’s 50% (these figures aren’t accurate – just a guess actually!) but Google has about 95% of the **buyers** online. Adwords search traffic tends to be around 20 times the volume of Yahoo Search (depending on the market) and the cost per conversion is much less on Google too. The point being, if something goes wrong with Google a lot of ecommerce and lead gen sites will be in for a terrible drought.
Absolute power does corrupt, absolutely. Are you talking about Google having absolute power? I think so. When they own every part of a transaction, that is “absolute.” Will this absolute power corrupt? It always does.
No Google won’t ever have absolute power, and my comments were whether Google having control over all of the processes would eventually lead to corruption and a breakdown in service quality.
I think we are already seeing a breakdown in service quality, Yaro!
Is it just me, or is google search really not all that great? I tend to use yahoo a little more often now.