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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).

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