This analysis breaks down because the transition from IBM->Microsoft->Smartphone companies was because of newer and better technology. Native ads hardly fit this category.
In fact, if you think about it, search ads are native ads! Just like sponsored Buzzfeed articles, search ads on Google pretend to be content. In some ways, it's like they're the ultimate native ad because they're close to what you expected to see when you typed in that query. They aren't annoying, they're very relevant and they're easy to buy.
> IBM didn’t capitalize on PCs because their skills lay on the hardware side, not software. Microsoft didn’t capitalize on mobile because they emphasized compatibility, not the user experience. And now Google is dominant when it comes to the algorithm, but lacks the human touch needed for social or viral content.
Google has expanded way beyond search ads and everything in the internet is their batting zone. They own:
- DoubleClick, the biggest ad server on the Internet
- Youtube, the biggest platform for videos
- Display Network, the largest contextual network of display ads on the internet
The author explicitly said google isn't going away any time soon.
The doubleclick exchange is, to first order, direct response. Not brand. The rise of mobile has not been particularly profitable for google. It's not clear that google's strength -- direct response -- will translate well to mobile. Google's cpc has been falling -- though simpson's paradox makes this difficult to interpret.
Google is, btw, seriously threatened by amazon, though that isn't mentioned in this article. Google's business is to tax ecommerce; the rise of amazon as a shopping destination where, particularly with prime, you don't search anywhere else cuts google out. Hence their initiatives like delivery.
Agree - commercials as "30 or 60 second fully produced dramas" is laughable. Native ads can fall to wide adoption of AdBlock. It's like commercial skipping on DVRs. The only "ads" that make sense long term are things like AMZN rankings. That's what GOOG needs to fear. Ads that are valuable to the user because they can't be bought - that breaks the business model.
To state that "few are even bothering to challenge [Google] anymore is to misunderstand the nature of Google's competition. This competition isn't Bing, DuckDuckGo, or any other generalized search engine, it's search engines that focus on the most lucrative niches. It's Amazon -- it was fairly recently that Amazon moved ahead of Google in the number of product-related searches originating on its site. It's Yelp, TripAdvisor, and WebMD, and there will be others. You don't need all of Google's search traffic to beat it -- a large chunk of it doesn't make any money -- just the part that pays.
Working for Google today is a lot like working for the Microsoft of ~15 years ago.
Employees are well paid, benefits are good, it's comfortable. The quality of the hires are still pretty good, but definitely not what they were 5 years ago. The engineering culture is still strong and permeates the entire organization, but the company is so large that less and less flexibility is allowed in each team's process. Thus, engineers (especially those at the lowest levels, like right out of school) aren't exposed to as much interesting work; many will find in 2-3 years that they have career opportunities at Google and companies of similar size but few opportunities at more interesting companies that are looking for someone with a few years experience with newer technologies. Technologies that Google doesn't use. Processes that Googlers don't know because they work in the confines of a huge corporation.
Still not a bad place to be 'cause Google pays well and they're comfortable. But then the best and brightest stop coming to Google. And then the company slowly dies a painful death toward irrelevancy that takes decades.
I think the comparison to Microsoft is spot on. The exact timeframe remains to be seen.
> many will find in 2-3 years that they have career opportunities at Google and companies of similar size but few opportunities at more interesting companies that are looking for someone with a few years experience with newer technologies.
What technologies would those be? I'm scratching my head trying to think of the latest, cool stuff that people want to work with.
On the language front, among the hottest right now are NodeJS and Go. Some might argue older languages like Erlang or Haskell are pretty trendy or perhaps Rust, but none of those have the current momentum of the first two and Google is behind the runtime for NodeJS and created Go.
On the data front, Hadoop is pretty trendy right now, but that's based almost entirely off stuff that Google pioneered. Other NoSQL databases are pretty popular and, again, Google has its fingerprints all over that. Hell, a bunch of the NoSQL technologies even use LevelDB as a storage backend.
Distributed systems? You'll learn more about them at Google than anywhere else. They were first with solutions to distributed consensus and they'll likely be first with whatever new need develops simply because their scale will ensure that they hit problems before almost anyone else.
DevOps technologies like Docker? Well, beyond the fact that Docker is implemented in Go, Google has long used internal technology like Docker and have supported Docker by releasing projects like Kubernetes.
Perhaps you mean cool hardware technology like self-driving cars, wearable technology, gigabit home internet, balloon-based internet or stuff like Chromecast?
So perhaps you can share with us what technology that they'd be exposed to elsewhere that they can't find within Google?
I'm one of those just out of school Googlers and while I obviously have no experience at MSFT I'll tell you why I don't see myself becoming bored at Google.
Google has a best-in-class (top 5?) product in pretty much every category of software. In 10 years a Googler could work on Drive, Android, G+, Gmail, Fiber, and Maps. While working on those things he/she will be exposed to an unparalleled developer infrastructure (Google's internal tools are rigid, but insanely well engineered). So why leave for another company when I could just change managers to work in pretty much any field on software? The only reason to jump ship would be toxic culture or money, and right now Google is at the top of the heap in both culture and pay.
"few opportunities at more interesting companies that are looking for someone with a few years experience with newer technologies"
When will companies realize that knowing how to design a large scale system, or a machine learning algorithm is more useful than knowing AngularJS or NodeJS?
Another arm-chair pundit trying to fit present to past anecdotes and predicting future... In 10 years of time Google might be self-driven car company which has search as side business or a company selling robots which walks and moves like humans quickly taking on cheap labor jobs. The strength of Google, in my view, is not its current products but ability, desire and enablement to innovate and take risks. This in part comes from its leadership and the culture. How many other companies take on the expensive product developments such as Fiber, city-wide wifi, online office, gmail, Android, home delivery etc - without a definitive business plan? During Bill Gates era, there was a saying in Microsoft that your product pitch would fail if you can't convince executives that your idea would yield another billion dollar business because they thought it simply wasn't worth their time. Even at the peak nobody thought IBM would take risks to start home delivery system or experiment with balloon based radio systems.
Sometimes the most important thing about a new product isn't the product, it's the go-to market strategy. Google hasn't proven it can conquer that last hurdle.
a company is measured by its profits, any new venture needs to have a business behind it. xerox parc, ms labs - great hobbies, no monetization. google x? nothing so far. glass is cooling off. car has driven 400k miles - on the same, tightly controled circuit. no commercial products in sight.
i personnally have had discussions with google execs about new business areas where google could easily transform established industries - to be shut down with the phrase "we don't touch any market below 1bn". and that was 3 years ago.
kids these days don't give a shit about google. search happens in the browser url bar, not google.com. search is a commodity. how exactly is google still relevant?
One thing this is leaving out is that IBM existed, and was very successful, long before mainframes. The company has existed since the 1880s for christ's sake. Additionally, during the mainframe era it had a number of other successful products, like the selectric typewriter. The history of IBM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM) is pretty damn long.
If you pick your dates right it's easy to find trends, but the real world is much more complex. HP, for instance, has taken a long, meandering path to where it is. It doesn't fit on a simple chart with simple graphics.
People were saying this back in 2011 ahead of Facebook's IPO. 2 years later, Google was looking as strong as ever.
I'm willing to bet that Google will be the first trillion dollar company. Their bench is just too deep. The only major mis-step I've seen is not aggressively rolling out an apple pay competitor 1-2 years ago (Giving away terminals if they had to).
The major threats Google faces right now are: (1) Precision marketing from Facebook (2) Companies like Amazon get so big that users side-step the need for Google discovery. Also an AI business can be as big as their search business (AI as a service in the new smart economy.)
Addressing these:
(1) Most people use Google far more each day than they use Facebook so there are just more opportunities to monetize. Frankly if Facebook disappeared it would be a minor inconvenience to most people, whereas if Google disappeared it would be armageddon. Facebook is always at risk of being superseded by another trend, but Google has become a necessary tool. Furthermore, most people check facebook 2-3 times per day and the real estate is far more limited in a facebook feed (Albeit far more valuable). Finally, Google still has Gmail which is basically the world's second biggest social network and it can be mined for far more valuable insight for even greater degrees of precision marketing.
(2) We only have room in our brains for handful of companies like Amazon, and Amazon is primarily limited to consumer goods. That still leaves the rest of the economy that needs discovery: cars, investments, nose jobs, viagra and fake twitter followers. Still, Google does need a mobile/local ad strategy. However, they can pool search history, Gmail, and track your physical location (Oh and they have maps) and start inserting hyper personalized ads/offers into their search result feed. Add a payment system to that layer and they'll crush it.
Google has had multiple missteps. G+, terrible customer service, lack of diversity in revenue, a lackluster post acquisitions track record besides android. The specific examples stated rely too heavily on personal experience. You site all these large companies in the US, but the world is much bigger than just the US.
10 years from now things could look very different geopolitically. It's not hard to imagine the "Amazon" of India or "Google" of China becoming the biggest in the world due to population and growing economies.
I am afraid you got (1) backward. If google search fell off the face of earth, bing will more than enough compensate it. However if facebook disappeared it'll be a lot more work establishing all the friend connections and migrating the entire network and content off to a different one. And no myspace did not even come close to the scale and depth of facebook.
Native advertising is so much more indirect and intrusive, I can't see how it could "trounce" search advertising in as dramatic a fashion as your charts suggest. Native adverts will definitely increase in prevalence, but search advertising still uniquely shows ads to people as they're actually looking for something.
I don't think the author trash talked search advertising. His point is around the increasing dominance of native advertising. Think about it. How long do you spend inside platforms on a given day? You probably have Facebook or Twitter open on a tab all the time. The odds of you looking at ads on any of those platforms are far more than you would on any of Google's. That isn't to say that one form of advertising is better than the other. It just means that native advertising is growing in prominence and Google doesn't technically have a presence in that space.
But that's the nature of branded advertising and why it's so big. Search is based on helping a consumer reach out and buy what they're looking for, while branded advertising reaches out to the consumer and convinces them to buy something they may not necessarily know they want to buy. Search fulfills current market desires, while branded advertising expands market desires.
Native adverts are why I turn off my iPad's wifi when playing games. I wish there was a way to use the notifier switch as a wifi switch. You wouldn't believe how much things improve. Advertisers just don't trust offline views, and probably for good reason.
I'm looking for a subtler approach though. Some way to keep browsing, keep things like app store accessible, but disable ads.
Google has a serious problem right now: the new Mobile ecosystem is driving users to vertical search services: individual Apps.
Want to buy stuff, open Amazon Shopping App; want to find restaurants nearby, Yelp is at your service; Take a ride maybe? Uber is your best friend. Same thing could be said for a lot of other stuff, like Airbnb for renting and Flipboard for news(damn, poor Google Reader). What makes things worse is that those kinds of traffic are Google's cash cows.
The point is, in the era of mobile, there isn't a unified entrance for everything, not like the way Google dominates Web. I think that is why Google Now comes to play, to ensure user can access google's search service with a single swipe, but it is hard to tell whether this will work out or not.
Of course, Google has the best technology in town, but the internet is a more diverse places right now. Even though it owns Android and Chrome, it won't become the sole gatekeeper of all information. Google will not become the microsoft of the internet, and maybe this is a good thing.
One major flaw in this thesis. Advertising marketplaces where the bids on eyeballs are competitive in theory will always continue to increase as long as the businesses in those markets continue grow. In other words, if the market for cookies grew it at 6% every year, and thus the number of searches for cookies grew at 6% per year, it means that as long as Google continues to hold a static position, they can increase the bidding for cookie keywords and thus increases revenues there without ever increasing market share. IBM and MS on the other hand have to continue to convince customers (i.e. sales) that their product rule. This is really costly.
The author suggest native advertizing will eclipse search. Really? This like saying Infomercials are going to replace prime time TV dramas.
>, if the market for cookies grew it at 6% every year, and thus the number of searches for cookies grew at 6% per year,
The author may have used poor examples to flesh out his thesis but I think his point is the contexts & triggers for advertisements can drastically change. When that happens, it can make newer companies become dominant.
For example, if Facebook-Apple comes out with an Oculus-or-wrist-wearable-augmented-reality-gadget, a user could be standing on a street corner and see a car pass by that he doesn't recognize. He then sends a voice command to his wearable to ask what the model is and it creates ads of dealers that sell it. The "search engine" behind the scenes could be Bing or whatever Facebook-Apple licenses.
The ads are still there. Searches (of some type) are still there. But the contextual triggers have changed. There are no business guarantees that google.com will remain in the pipeline of future (lucrative) ad triggers.
My example above may also be convoluted but I'm sure others could imagine a future where the majority of searches come from another mechanism besides typing words into a little box on a webpage. Ad rates from google would nosedive because advertisers would pay a premium for Oculus ads instead of google.com ads. I think those are the scenarios that would "eclipse" google.com.
This has happened before with newspapers. The car industry grew but newspapers ad rates for cars and car dealers have declined. A lot of those ad dollars shifted to television and google. Newspapers declined even though they still run ads for cars today.
Google is just as well poised for getting brand advertising dollars. Specifically consider this point from the article itself: "To date this type of brand advertising has strongly favored television; targeting is certainly nice, but channels like Lifetime (Dove) or ESPN (Axe) are specific enough..."
The majority of brand advertising dollars are currently in TV. What's the next generation of TV? We don't know yet, but these are some contenders:
1) Apple - Apple TV / iTunes
2) Amazon - Streaming Prime Content
3) Netflix
4) Google - Android TV & Youtube
Out of all these players only Google is taking advertising model for video content; the rest of the players are monetizing through content itself. Thus, it's very possible that Google will be taking the lion's share of brand advertising dollars as consumers cut cable.
I wouldn't count Google out of the brand advertising game. Youtube has over 1 billion monthly actives who consume 6 hours a month in a format very friendly to native ads.
1. Android is no longer just a way for Google to protect its search engine - it is now a strong contender to become the biggest platform for watching TV and movies in the world.
2. Google knows more about me than anyone else. They know my age, sex, occupation, where I sleep, who I email, what supermarket I shop at, and a thousand other details. That's an enormous competitive advantage in the business of selling brand (or 'Native') advertising.
3. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, people who produce compelling TV and movies usually just auction off the advertising rights to the highest bidder. Google can simply buy the right to advertise in the next James Bond film or English Premier League final.
Of the points you make, I think point 1 is very interesting but I am not sure about it. I mean, they attempted with Google TV and it never took off.
They've had Google Play Movies for a while but do you see any good films on there?
Regarding point 2, the data they have is valuable but do people like being advertised to?
Product placement in films is pretty nastily received though. Look at Iron Man 2 and the appearances of Oracle and Larry Ellison everywhere; it was not enjoyable. It didn't make me want to switch database providers.
(I didn't notice that Elon Musk is in it too)
The argument eats itself on its most substantive point: native advertising. The writer dismisses "youtube" as the exception to Google's supposed weakness in native advertising.
Personally, I'd much rather be Youtube than any of the other examples cited (facebook and so on). Not only is Youtube an absolute monster in video streaming, Youtube is going to be even more important as set top boxes take off. Plus there's a lot more social innovation left to tap in Youtube.
In an age when information is ubiquitous, with advertisers trying to monetize every bit of it, filtering becomes an important skill. Today advertisers run ads alongside content, tomorrow advertisers and brands will dictate what content gets written. It's already happening with native ads as this post shows, but will soon become standard. The Truth will become increasingly elusive to the unskilled: a new kind of digital divide.
This has been true for a while though. Consumer behavior is clearly manipulated by advertising, and it's common that an inferior and more expensive product wins as the result of superior marketing.
I don't think it's something we're permanently tethered to though. As reviews are getting better, consumers are realizing more and more that knowing which product is best for them is a very valuable tool. We're seeing stuff like yelp, tripadvisor, healthgrades really take off. The idea of being an "informed" consumer is gaining a lot of traction and that's going to dilute the effectiveness of targeted advertisement.
Advertising has a large spectrum and what you're describing is product placement which has been around as long as advertising has existed. Whether it's placement in a movie, a well crafted article, or a celebrity endorsement. Even academic studies are funded by private parties that have an incentive to sell you something.
I skimmed this article 3 times...Sorry, was there any actual substance to this link-baity headline, other than "Mainframes were big, now they're not and PCs were big, now they are not, ergo, Google is big, and someday they will not be"?
The OP provides little to no hypothesis on what will takeover Google...more "human" content, a la Buzzfeed? Seriously?? And then the OP goes on to dismiss all of Google's next-gen research (self-driving cars, Google Glass, etc) with a conclusion akin "Well Microsoft Research sucked so Google will to".
The OP is link-bait wankery at its worst. I'm sorry to even have spent 15 minutes trying to interpret it.
I would challenge the core of Ben Thompson's argument, namely:
> $50 billion for worldwide search advertising (of which Google captures a huge majority) sounds like a lot, but it’s only a small percentage of total ad spend, projected to be $545 billion in 2014. The vast majority of that spend is not about direct response – i.e. ads that spur you to make a purchase on the spot; rather most of the money is spent on brand advertising.
Essentially his point is direct response is ~10% of brand advertising, and that other players are better positioned than Gooogle to capture that.
But what if that ratio itself were a legacy assumption? And thus, why should we take his following statement at face value:
> The idea behind brand advertising is to build “affinity” among potential customers.
I posit that brand advertising has traditionally been orders of magnitude larger than direct advertising because options for quality direct response advertising were limited. But thanks to the rise of the web and mobile, we're now moving into an era where the line between brand advertising & direct advertising is blurring. Not just that, but the time/distance between a customer's latent desires to purchase action is also shortening, thanks to 24x7 e-commerce.
In this world, why should direct response be 1/10th of brand advertising? Heck, why should direct response always be distinct from brand advertising?
Sure, companies will continue to run brand adverting, including ads masquerading as stories (advertorials once, "native ads" today). But the split (or even distinction) between direct response and brand advertising will continue to reduce.
I find the 'Peak <x>' meme somewhat tired but the point that everyone guns for the monopoly and is a valid one. I've noted over the years that Google's CPC has been falling steadily, and the amount they have been spending on paid distribution has been growing even faster. But mostly that means that they are no longer the 'new thing' and now are the 'old thing' where 'stream advertising' is the 'new thing' now. And while they really pushed hard on making G+ their stream I don't think it has been as successful as they would have liked.
I've also noticed that search hasn't been about finding every web page for a long time now, now it is a service that is part of some app or other environment, and it isn't unique. The article's point about Amazon doing more product searches, I can believe it based on experience that nearly always a search on Google gives an amazon link that I seem to invariably click on, if only to read the reviews. So why not search on Amazon first?
In my opinion, it is only a matter of time before Google tries to monetize the non-commerce queries. Once the RPMs on Bing, Yahoo, and Google Ad feeds are all about the same the underlying crawling and indexing search infrastructure will become a drag on profits. That will be an interesting time for me.
As such, their ability to monetize that avenue will remain intact. And it's an extraordinarily lucrative position. It does not matter whether the ideal format for mobile ads is native or not, if it is then Google will adapt their search dominance to that approach and print money the same as they have been.
There has been no drop off in their mobile search position of power, and there's nothing likely to displace their role there.
There's no particular reason mentioned in the article, for why Google can't benefit with the reach of mobile in regards to advertising. I saw no explanation for why search won't get bigger with the mobile market's growth in the next decade. Nor why Google isn't just as well positioned as anybody to take a big cut of native ads via search.
The only way in which this is approximately peak Google, is that their PE ratio is likely to compress to half what it is now over the next decade, while their profits increase, leading to a flat stock for a very long time (as happens to most companies in their situation; eg Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, Intel, etc).
Google Search is vulnerable for the first time in years.
If I type "king" into Safari's address bar on my iPhone, even with Google search suggestions turned off, it prominently suggests "Wikipedia: King Games". Spotlight on Yosemite does the same.
Apple are quietly relegating Google results to second place or worse. Is there a better result in Wikipedia? In iTunes? In the App Store? On Maps? Spotlight highlights that; it's probably what you want. It's not hard to imagine deals with Amazon (tablet/ebook rivalry aside) and Yelp, too.
The remaining search results are supplied by Bing for Spotlight, Google for Safari. But I expect Bing to replace Google in Safari for iOS 9.
This is how Google will be dethroned. Not by someone building a better text-based search engine, but by Apple and Microsoft routing around them. And this is why Android remains so important to Google, and why Google were so anxious to prevent Samsung going their own way.
Google managed to ride two subsequent waves: web (not pc which came before) and mobile. Between Glass and Magic Leap, they're well on their way to catch the third wave of virtual/augmented reality.
And native adverts, really? Let's hope this is not the grand industry of the future. Not for Google's sake but for our own.
Claiming that VR/AR is a wave on the same order of magnitude as mobile a bold statement. Mostly AR/VR extend existing waves. They make gaming better. They make mobile better. They are not by themselves the same kind of shift as PC -> Mobile.
[+] [-] temuze|11 years ago|reply
This analysis breaks down because the transition from IBM->Microsoft->Smartphone companies was because of newer and better technology. Native ads hardly fit this category.
In fact, if you think about it, search ads are native ads! Just like sponsored Buzzfeed articles, search ads on Google pretend to be content. In some ways, it's like they're the ultimate native ad because they're close to what you expected to see when you typed in that query. They aren't annoying, they're very relevant and they're easy to buy.
> IBM didn’t capitalize on PCs because their skills lay on the hardware side, not software. Microsoft didn’t capitalize on mobile because they emphasized compatibility, not the user experience. And now Google is dominant when it comes to the algorithm, but lacks the human touch needed for social or viral content.
Google has expanded way beyond search ads and everything in the internet is their batting zone. They own:
- DoubleClick, the biggest ad server on the Internet
- Youtube, the biggest platform for videos
- Display Network, the largest contextual network of display ads on the internet
Google isn't going away any time soon.
[+] [-] x0x0|11 years ago|reply
The doubleclick exchange is, to first order, direct response. Not brand. The rise of mobile has not been particularly profitable for google. It's not clear that google's strength -- direct response -- will translate well to mobile. Google's cpc has been falling -- though simpson's paradox makes this difficult to interpret.
Google is, btw, seriously threatened by amazon, though that isn't mentioned in this article. Google's business is to tax ecommerce; the rise of amazon as a shopping destination where, particularly with prime, you don't search anywhere else cuts google out. Hence their initiatives like delivery.
[+] [-] jrkelly|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kreinba|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justicezyx|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ivv|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jquery|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nextstep|11 years ago|reply
Employees are well paid, benefits are good, it's comfortable. The quality of the hires are still pretty good, but definitely not what they were 5 years ago. The engineering culture is still strong and permeates the entire organization, but the company is so large that less and less flexibility is allowed in each team's process. Thus, engineers (especially those at the lowest levels, like right out of school) aren't exposed to as much interesting work; many will find in 2-3 years that they have career opportunities at Google and companies of similar size but few opportunities at more interesting companies that are looking for someone with a few years experience with newer technologies. Technologies that Google doesn't use. Processes that Googlers don't know because they work in the confines of a huge corporation.
Still not a bad place to be 'cause Google pays well and they're comfortable. But then the best and brightest stop coming to Google. And then the company slowly dies a painful death toward irrelevancy that takes decades.
I think the comparison to Microsoft is spot on. The exact timeframe remains to be seen.
[+] [-] curun1r|11 years ago|reply
What technologies would those be? I'm scratching my head trying to think of the latest, cool stuff that people want to work with.
On the language front, among the hottest right now are NodeJS and Go. Some might argue older languages like Erlang or Haskell are pretty trendy or perhaps Rust, but none of those have the current momentum of the first two and Google is behind the runtime for NodeJS and created Go.
On the data front, Hadoop is pretty trendy right now, but that's based almost entirely off stuff that Google pioneered. Other NoSQL databases are pretty popular and, again, Google has its fingerprints all over that. Hell, a bunch of the NoSQL technologies even use LevelDB as a storage backend.
Distributed systems? You'll learn more about them at Google than anywhere else. They were first with solutions to distributed consensus and they'll likely be first with whatever new need develops simply because their scale will ensure that they hit problems before almost anyone else.
DevOps technologies like Docker? Well, beyond the fact that Docker is implemented in Go, Google has long used internal technology like Docker and have supported Docker by releasing projects like Kubernetes.
Perhaps you mean cool hardware technology like self-driving cars, wearable technology, gigabit home internet, balloon-based internet or stuff like Chromecast?
So perhaps you can share with us what technology that they'd be exposed to elsewhere that they can't find within Google?
[+] [-] cperciva|11 years ago|reply
Funny, I think that's word-for-word identical to what people at Google were telling me in 2006.
[+] [-] habosa|11 years ago|reply
Google has a best-in-class (top 5?) product in pretty much every category of software. In 10 years a Googler could work on Drive, Android, G+, Gmail, Fiber, and Maps. While working on those things he/she will be exposed to an unparalleled developer infrastructure (Google's internal tools are rigid, but insanely well engineered). So why leave for another company when I could just change managers to work in pretty much any field on software? The only reason to jump ship would be toxic culture or money, and right now Google is at the top of the heap in both culture and pay.
[+] [-] AznHisoka|11 years ago|reply
When will companies realize that knowing how to design a large scale system, or a machine learning algorithm is more useful than knowing AngularJS or NodeJS?
[+] [-] xur17|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiousDog|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytelus|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cscurmudgeon|11 years ago|reply
So balloon based radio > IBM Watson?
[+] [-] missserenity|11 years ago|reply
Here's Steve Jobs talking about the challenges with Apple TV and it's go-to-market strategy: http://youtu.be/-pSfOKMEbG0?t=31s
[+] [-] pinaceae|11 years ago|reply
a company is measured by its profits, any new venture needs to have a business behind it. xerox parc, ms labs - great hobbies, no monetization. google x? nothing so far. glass is cooling off. car has driven 400k miles - on the same, tightly controled circuit. no commercial products in sight.
i personnally have had discussions with google execs about new business areas where google could easily transform established industries - to be shut down with the phrase "we don't touch any market below 1bn". and that was 3 years ago.
kids these days don't give a shit about google. search happens in the browser url bar, not google.com. search is a commodity. how exactly is google still relevant?
[+] [-] andrewvc|11 years ago|reply
If you pick your dates right it's easy to find trends, but the real world is much more complex. HP, for instance, has taken a long, meandering path to where it is. It doesn't fit on a simple chart with simple graphics.
[+] [-] jacques_chester|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleet|11 years ago|reply
[1] http://youtu.be/39jtNUGgmd4
[+] [-] jthol|11 years ago|reply
Yeah it does just keep zooming in.
[+] [-] rdlecler1|11 years ago|reply
I'm willing to bet that Google will be the first trillion dollar company. Their bench is just too deep. The only major mis-step I've seen is not aggressively rolling out an apple pay competitor 1-2 years ago (Giving away terminals if they had to).
The major threats Google faces right now are: (1) Precision marketing from Facebook (2) Companies like Amazon get so big that users side-step the need for Google discovery. Also an AI business can be as big as their search business (AI as a service in the new smart economy.)
Addressing these: (1) Most people use Google far more each day than they use Facebook so there are just more opportunities to monetize. Frankly if Facebook disappeared it would be a minor inconvenience to most people, whereas if Google disappeared it would be armageddon. Facebook is always at risk of being superseded by another trend, but Google has become a necessary tool. Furthermore, most people check facebook 2-3 times per day and the real estate is far more limited in a facebook feed (Albeit far more valuable). Finally, Google still has Gmail which is basically the world's second biggest social network and it can be mined for far more valuable insight for even greater degrees of precision marketing.
(2) We only have room in our brains for handful of companies like Amazon, and Amazon is primarily limited to consumer goods. That still leaves the rest of the economy that needs discovery: cars, investments, nose jobs, viagra and fake twitter followers. Still, Google does need a mobile/local ad strategy. However, they can pool search history, Gmail, and track your physical location (Oh and they have maps) and start inserting hyper personalized ads/offers into their search result feed. Add a payment system to that layer and they'll crush it.
[+] [-] jyu|11 years ago|reply
Google has had multiple missteps. G+, terrible customer service, lack of diversity in revenue, a lackluster post acquisitions track record besides android. The specific examples stated rely too heavily on personal experience. You site all these large companies in the US, but the world is much bigger than just the US.
10 years from now things could look very different geopolitically. It's not hard to imagine the "Amazon" of India or "Google" of China becoming the biggest in the world due to population and growing economies.
[+] [-] missserenity|11 years ago|reply
This says people spend an average of 40 minutes per day on Facebook: http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/23/facebook-usage-time/
I can't find quite the same statistic for Google, but this says 22 billion minutes / 47 million vistors / month, which is about 15 minutes. Of which 60-some percent is YouTube. http://mediatel.co.uk/newsline/2014/08/07/22-billion-minutes...
Now thats two different countries, but I suspect the numbers are pretty similar.
[+] [-] Donzo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvec34|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ISL|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazzlazzlazz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nagarjun|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imjk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waps|11 years ago|reply
I'm looking for a subtler approach though. Some way to keep browsing, keep things like app store accessible, but disable ads.
[+] [-] eva1984|11 years ago|reply
Want to buy stuff, open Amazon Shopping App; want to find restaurants nearby, Yelp is at your service; Take a ride maybe? Uber is your best friend. Same thing could be said for a lot of other stuff, like Airbnb for renting and Flipboard for news(damn, poor Google Reader). What makes things worse is that those kinds of traffic are Google's cash cows.
The point is, in the era of mobile, there isn't a unified entrance for everything, not like the way Google dominates Web. I think that is why Google Now comes to play, to ensure user can access google's search service with a single swipe, but it is hard to tell whether this will work out or not.
Of course, Google has the best technology in town, but the internet is a more diverse places right now. Even though it owns Android and Chrome, it won't become the sole gatekeeper of all information. Google will not become the microsoft of the internet, and maybe this is a good thing.
[+] [-] mbesto|11 years ago|reply
The author suggest native advertizing will eclipse search. Really? This like saying Infomercials are going to replace prime time TV dramas.
[+] [-] jasode|11 years ago|reply
The author may have used poor examples to flesh out his thesis but I think his point is the contexts & triggers for advertisements can drastically change. When that happens, it can make newer companies become dominant.
For example, if Facebook-Apple comes out with an Oculus-or-wrist-wearable-augmented-reality-gadget, a user could be standing on a street corner and see a car pass by that he doesn't recognize. He then sends a voice command to his wearable to ask what the model is and it creates ads of dealers that sell it. The "search engine" behind the scenes could be Bing or whatever Facebook-Apple licenses.
The ads are still there. Searches (of some type) are still there. But the contextual triggers have changed. There are no business guarantees that google.com will remain in the pipeline of future (lucrative) ad triggers.
My example above may also be convoluted but I'm sure others could imagine a future where the majority of searches come from another mechanism besides typing words into a little box on a webpage. Ad rates from google would nosedive because advertisers would pay a premium for Oculus ads instead of google.com ads. I think those are the scenarios that would "eclipse" google.com.
This has happened before with newspapers. The car industry grew but newspapers ad rates for cars and car dealers have declined. A lot of those ad dollars shifted to television and google. Newspapers declined even though they still run ads for cars today.
[+] [-] slykat|11 years ago|reply
The majority of brand advertising dollars are currently in TV. What's the next generation of TV? We don't know yet, but these are some contenders:
1) Apple - Apple TV / iTunes 2) Amazon - Streaming Prime Content 3) Netflix 4) Google - Android TV & Youtube
Out of all these players only Google is taking advertising model for video content; the rest of the players are monetizing through content itself. Thus, it's very possible that Google will be taking the lion's share of brand advertising dollars as consumers cut cable.
I wouldn't count Google out of the brand advertising game. Youtube has over 1 billion monthly actives who consume 6 hours a month in a format very friendly to native ads.
[+] [-] MarkMc|11 years ago|reply
1. Android is no longer just a way for Google to protect its search engine - it is now a strong contender to become the biggest platform for watching TV and movies in the world.
2. Google knows more about me than anyone else. They know my age, sex, occupation, where I sleep, who I email, what supermarket I shop at, and a thousand other details. That's an enormous competitive advantage in the business of selling brand (or 'Native') advertising.
3. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, people who produce compelling TV and movies usually just auction off the advertising rights to the highest bidder. Google can simply buy the right to advertise in the next James Bond film or English Premier League final.
[+] [-] 72deluxe|11 years ago|reply
Regarding point 2, the data they have is valuable but do people like being advertised to?
Product placement in films is pretty nastily received though. Look at Iron Man 2 and the appearances of Oracle and Larry Ellison everywhere; it was not enjoyable. It didn't make me want to switch database providers. (I didn't notice that Elon Musk is in it too)
[+] [-] misterbishop|11 years ago|reply
Personally, I'd much rather be Youtube than any of the other examples cited (facebook and so on). Not only is Youtube an absolute monster in video streaming, Youtube is going to be even more important as set top boxes take off. Plus there's a lot more social innovation left to tap in Youtube.
[+] [-] shanev|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Taek|11 years ago|reply
I don't think it's something we're permanently tethered to though. As reviews are getting better, consumers are realizing more and more that knowing which product is best for them is a very valuable tool. We're seeing stuff like yelp, tripadvisor, healthgrades really take off. The idea of being an "informed" consumer is gaining a lot of traction and that's going to dilute the effectiveness of targeted advertisement.
[+] [-] imjk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|11 years ago|reply
The OP provides little to no hypothesis on what will takeover Google...more "human" content, a la Buzzfeed? Seriously?? And then the OP goes on to dismiss all of Google's next-gen research (self-driving cars, Google Glass, etc) with a conclusion akin "Well Microsoft Research sucked so Google will to".
The OP is link-bait wankery at its worst. I'm sorry to even have spent 15 minutes trying to interpret it.
[+] [-] r0h1n|11 years ago|reply
> $50 billion for worldwide search advertising (of which Google captures a huge majority) sounds like a lot, but it’s only a small percentage of total ad spend, projected to be $545 billion in 2014. The vast majority of that spend is not about direct response – i.e. ads that spur you to make a purchase on the spot; rather most of the money is spent on brand advertising.
Essentially his point is direct response is ~10% of brand advertising, and that other players are better positioned than Gooogle to capture that.
But what if that ratio itself were a legacy assumption? And thus, why should we take his following statement at face value:
> The idea behind brand advertising is to build “affinity” among potential customers.
I posit that brand advertising has traditionally been orders of magnitude larger than direct advertising because options for quality direct response advertising were limited. But thanks to the rise of the web and mobile, we're now moving into an era where the line between brand advertising & direct advertising is blurring. Not just that, but the time/distance between a customer's latent desires to purchase action is also shortening, thanks to 24x7 e-commerce.
In this world, why should direct response be 1/10th of brand advertising? Heck, why should direct response always be distinct from brand advertising?
Sure, companies will continue to run brand adverting, including ads masquerading as stories (advertorials once, "native ads" today). But the split (or even distinction) between direct response and brand advertising will continue to reduce.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ChuckMcM|11 years ago|reply
I've also noticed that search hasn't been about finding every web page for a long time now, now it is a service that is part of some app or other environment, and it isn't unique. The article's point about Amazon doing more product searches, I can believe it based on experience that nearly always a search on Google gives an amazon link that I seem to invariably click on, if only to read the reviews. So why not search on Amazon first?
In my opinion, it is only a matter of time before Google tries to monetize the non-commerce queries. Once the RPMs on Bing, Yahoo, and Google Ad feeds are all about the same the underlying crawling and indexing search infrastructure will become a drag on profits. That will be an interesting time for me.
[+] [-] adventured|11 years ago|reply
As such, their ability to monetize that avenue will remain intact. And it's an extraordinarily lucrative position. It does not matter whether the ideal format for mobile ads is native or not, if it is then Google will adapt their search dominance to that approach and print money the same as they have been.
There has been no drop off in their mobile search position of power, and there's nothing likely to displace their role there.
There's no particular reason mentioned in the article, for why Google can't benefit with the reach of mobile in regards to advertising. I saw no explanation for why search won't get bigger with the mobile market's growth in the next decade. Nor why Google isn't just as well positioned as anybody to take a big cut of native ads via search.
The only way in which this is approximately peak Google, is that their PE ratio is likely to compress to half what it is now over the next decade, while their profits increase, leading to a flat stock for a very long time (as happens to most companies in their situation; eg Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, Intel, etc).
[+] [-] Doctor_Fegg|11 years ago|reply
If I type "king" into Safari's address bar on my iPhone, even with Google search suggestions turned off, it prominently suggests "Wikipedia: King Games". Spotlight on Yosemite does the same.
Apple are quietly relegating Google results to second place or worse. Is there a better result in Wikipedia? In iTunes? In the App Store? On Maps? Spotlight highlights that; it's probably what you want. It's not hard to imagine deals with Amazon (tablet/ebook rivalry aside) and Yelp, too.
The remaining search results are supplied by Bing for Spotlight, Google for Safari. But I expect Bing to replace Google in Safari for iOS 9.
This is how Google will be dethroned. Not by someone building a better text-based search engine, but by Apple and Microsoft routing around them. And this is why Android remains so important to Google, and why Google were so anxious to prevent Samsung going their own way.
[+] [-] spindritf|11 years ago|reply
And native adverts, really? Let's hope this is not the grand industry of the future. Not for Google's sake but for our own.
[+] [-] acgourley|11 years ago|reply