The Future of Google

In chapter 10, “Google Today, Google Tomorrow,” Battelle notes several challenges Google will need to overcome in the next few years – “Can it continue to innovate in the face of treacherous competition? Can it keep its most productive employees despite their own personal wealth? Can it learn how to partner with outside companies who find Google’s loose approach to business confusing and dangerous? And finally, can the triumvirate of Schmidt, Page, and Brin hold it together…” (p 230).  

Some additional questions come to mind, such as, will Google succeed in the ever-elusive
“Semantic Web” or the “Perfect Search”? Will Google finally become known as a true media company, not just a “search” company? In Battelle’s blogpost this week, he muses over “the age-old conflict that Google faces between being a pure navigation service – ‘We get you where you want to go’- and being a media company – ‘We get you to our properties, where we make more money if you stay.’” According to Battelle this conflict is a very real, urgent, and present one. If Google succeeds in this venture, they will become a true media company that effectively competes for your attention and monetizes it with advertising, not one that gives you your search results and sends you on your way.

This week, several news stories involving Google and its apparent still-bright future have emerged. Google plans to be a significant player in the display ad market in the next year, considering YouTube, the company’s “brightest light.” Tim Armstrong, Google’s North American president for advertising and commerce, said Google’s advertising platform will evolve over time so that it won’t distinguish between search and display ads. Google is just waiting on regulatory approval to complete its proposed acquisition of DoubleClick Inc., “a transaction that would enable Google to make a more aggressive push to expand beyond search ads into the market for graphical display ads such as banner ads. “

 In other Google news, the company plans to unveil a new ad service to web publishers to manage their online ad sales, another tactic Google is using to broaden its reach in the online advertising world.

In Google Apps news, Google has updated its applications for business, schools, and other organizations including a new interface, group chat from the browser, an improved contact manager, color-coded message labels, and bookmarkable messages and searches.

Batelle notes an important part of Google being Google…it’s culture.

Today, an interesting post on TechDirt discusses problems that could arise from the merging of two company cultures, in this case Yahoo and Microsoft, and references Google as a prime example of the importance of culture in a corporation (even if Google is an extreme example). This post links to Grant McKracken’s blog, who argues that corporations are inherently cultural and ”when things go bad in a merger or an acquisition, the problem is sometimes not with the mechanics, not with the infrastructure of the deal.  The problem is with the superstructure of the deal, the ideas, practices and cultures that must now be brought together for things to work.”