Truemor: What Google Is *Really* Planning For 2008
06/20/2007, 1 year 2 months ago
Truemor: What Google is *really* planning for 2008. Okay, the rumor starts here(my theory, doh)… Short version: elgoog (Google) is planning to launch the world's largest social networking site 'overnight' and at the flick of a switch and will become the Mitsubishi of the internet.
Huh? Exactly. Let me explain… while Yahoo! and others continue to explore acquisitions in the social networking space (e.g. Bebo et al), and the “buy-me-I'm-Facebook” dance continues, stop and ask yourself a question: having already built or acquired every relevant component of a consumer and enterprise social networking solution, why has elgoog not postured in this space beyond that speckle-of-a-network Orkut? Alternatively: with billions of free working capital for acquisitions, why has Google ignored social networking site acquisitions beyond the super-niche (e.g. Dodgeball, now dying on the vine)?
The answer: because elgoog is planning to launch the world's largest social networking application within 12-18 months on its own. It will dwarf everything else out there and rattle the entire internet and new media landscape. Facebook gets it, hence the “we're now an OS” dream… but they're far too small to matter. 'Some people in the world' use Facebook right now - but 'over 60 percent of people looking for anything online' use elgoog (compare those numbers).
Ever hear of Mitsubishi? Cars, electronics, all that crap? Did you also know that they're making and moving over one-third of the world's fertilizer? (hey, this is going somewhere)… Mitsubishi believes in a philosophy called “insiderization” - think of it this way: Why make fertilizer and then sell it to others, or why simply trade the commodity and let others move and sell? Why not just BE the maker, the market and the buyer and move inside, up and down the market? That's what they've done over the years, and fertilizer is a great example if one just looks at how they work with Monsanto and others to control all angles and variables in the channel.
As for elgoog, well, they've already built or bought every targeted service (messaging, voice, mail, video, pictures, payment, data storage, collaborative apps, etc) - and they've got a simple publishing platform in place (think 'Google Pages 2.0'). All they need to do now is flick a very small switch: you log in and are presented with an option to 'publish your Google profile(s)' and in doing so elect to include select apps/services and make all or some available to groups/user across the 'Google network' - this really wouldn't be much of a technical stretch for this personal data aggregator to execute.
So while Facebook dreams of some ridiculous world where third parties clamor to build lightweight feature-poor apps inside their cluttered networking space (which reaches only a minority of global interweb users), elgoog is just going to “be the entire space” and throw networking into the mix to expound the details and nuances of services and features for both consumers and enterprises (it's well suited to both markets, and a great way to move enterprise users back and forth between business and personal apps with a single sign-on approach).
Goodbye MySpace, goodbye LinkedIn, Facebook, Bebo and all of the countless others riding the insane networking wave (Yahoo! and Wallop included for now)… You have all completely missed this dark horse running in the social networking universe. How? You were way to busy looking at the trees - the interweb IS just a social networking infrastructure, and all elgoog has been doing is building a simple utility to search and connect users with increasingly finer gradations of profile data and application utility (e.g. collaborative apps, calendaring and other 'group/singleuser' services) until one day - poof! - the Black Stallion emerges to stomp on the snake and ride away on the beach with the kid.
Oh, and by the way, in my opinion the only (and I mean absolutely the only) player that can rattle and compete is Microsoft. With the largest installed software user base in the world and a gigantic installed web mail user base, all they need to do is allow for the same profile publishing services as they already do for enterprise, roll it out to consumers at zero cost and figure out how to slowly integrate their growing world of online apps and services. Why not Yahoo? Well, maybe they could do it with their new leadership - and they've already got a lot of what's required, including transaction processing capabilities, profile management and all of that - I just find it hard to believe that they have the intuitive judgement skills (aka 'faith') to execute such a plan.
So yeah, that's what was on my mind this week. I'd love to hear some feedback on this because I have not found anybody else talking about this logical next step for Google.
This post was written for Profy iPhone competition by David Carpe, the founder of Clew, LLC, a competitive intelligence consulting firm serving some of the world's most formidable organizations. He is also the blogger behind PassingNotes.com and a regularly featured columnist for Competitive Intelligence Magazine. He lives in Boston with his boys and their one-eyed dog. Enter the competition to get your iPhone for free!
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Sounds smart to me! If it does happen, I’ll remember that I read it here first!
David,
I think this is a very plausible idea. I think your logic and arguments are bang-on. My thought, though, is that they will launch a web browser next. Rumours have swirled around this possibility and I think it is the logical, strategic next step for the company. Then… *POW*… bring on the social network
In any case, excellent article…
Cheers,
Aidan Henry
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
hey, thanks for the kind words (marshall and aidan) - as for the browser, that’s a VERY interesting and distinct ‘other theory’ of mine (short story is that google does not need a platform like an OS to succeed, but they do need one very reliable browser upon which to build and integrate richer clients to support offline utility…sounded like it may have been mozilla, but if you listen to people like dibona talk about how goog needs open source to control their destiny, mozilla doesn’t fit [too much conflict with control over future direction, and a ‘fork’ would present a HUGE nightmare) - the solution? just guess. (answer: safari)
I like the idea - and have wondered why Google has taken so long to “launch” Orkut to the wider world. However for Google to take over this space they would need to get millions of people to sign on very quickly. People have spent a lot of time on their Myspace pages, Facebook pages, building their LinkedIn networks and so on.
Would any new networking option from Google offer the same things to all these people - the musicians on Myspace, the college (and now business) networks on Facebook and the business / recruitment ethos at LinkedIn? And more importantly, would they be able to get people to switch quickly without too much effort. Just imagine a reasonable sized LinkedIn networker with 100+ nodes, or what about the larger ones with 1000+ nodes built up over a few years. What would encourage them to switch. It’s the network and the number of links that count in these cases more than anything else. Then you have groups like Ecademy which, although smaller with only a million or so networkers, are important in some markets e.g. the UK, and have regular off-line meetings and networking sessions. I don’t see Google organizing big speaker events in hotels for their members.
What I do see is that Google could try and combine these in some way - with a new tab “Networking Search”. Google already indexes a lot of these pages - you can find people who are on LinkedIn on Google searches for their names easily. Similarly Ecademy and some of the other groups. If Google extended this, then it could grow the scene considerably and allow the various networks to interlink with each other. Now that would be POWERFUL!
As for browsers - again, it would need to offer something different which would get people to switch. I like Google Spreadsheets and Docs. I’ve used them for cross-border work projects to cooperate with others. BUT they are not a patch on Word, Excel or their OpenOffice equivalents - and I don’t see that they can be in the short term. It’s easier and faster to work on your own computer than to suffer the vagaries of a network EXCEPT when you need to edit a document in collaboration with others. This is not how most people work - and I don’t believe it ever will be for most of the time and most people. So, what would a Google Browser offer that the open nature of Firefox can’t.
One of the strengths of Google is to innovate and fix things that were not working properly. They’ll buy up stuff to help this process. They’ll integrate stuff to make things easier and make them a one-stop shop for everything online (which is what I can see for the social networking arena) BUT from what I can see, they also follow a motto “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
This comment marks 2 weeks have passed since publication of this article which means that the iPhone contest is over for it. But your further comments are perfectly welcome here.
Also everyone is invited to participate in the contest with your articles about Web 2.0, we still have 4 rounds of the contest ahead
Hey
Its an excellent article about future development of Google, But it may not be wrong! Wow! Any way you make better research on the subject matters
Thanks
Arif
Just stumbled across this rant a little late.. still relevant. I’ve been pondering the same line of thinking. Microsoft’s recent maneuvering with Live spaces and msn/hotmail is a fairly good indication that they know what they’re up against.
Google has every possible trump card… it’s really quite amazing how well positioned they are for such a scenario that you have described (stallion snakestomp outta nowhere). The movements with iGoogle + web history and the fact they haven’t really bothered to develop the social networking capabilities of their other assets (yt, orkut) really does suggest they have something bigger and better in mind.
I’ll bookmark this page with my comment for historic lolz