Technology Decoded

The strength of Google

I've downloaded Google Pack to get the best of Googles free products into one application which will automatically manage and update them. This is how software and applications should be available to the public. Simple, effective and i want more!

Google is such an exciting company! Half the world's internet population, 1bn plus, either have them as their homepage or as their primary search engine. They are in control of the 'webtop' (much the same as Microsoft to the desktop). I know that at the moment they're still essentially (as the analysts put it) a 'one trick pony' with 98% of their revenues coming from advertising, but you gotta hand it to them, they REALLY know their customer.

I think this is their 'unfair advantage'. Everything they're creating is simple, easy to use with nicely rendered graphics, lots of white space to remove information overload and even if you don't need their applications they're fun to play with anyway.

Now don't get me wrong, every dog has its day and I'm sure there will come an end to Google's meteoric rise (IPO August 2004 $85, close of play friday $465 with Bear Stearns giving a 'buy' guidance and target of $550), but lets be fair, Google knows this and is using its almighty market valuation of $113bn to get all the techie and marketing brains together to stave off that chance and turn it into the world's dominant communications company.

To me it appears to have a 'land grab' strategy. Screw Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay and anyone else, they want as many eyeballs at whatever price now and will work out how to extract revenues at a future moment. This is working well, they are in their honeymoon phase with the markets and are using their cash reserves to acquire the necessary eyeballs. As the markets chose their next favourite, Google will need to work out how to convert their audience to a wider revenue set beyond Adsense and Adword.

Of course, they recognise this and are making headway into Wifi / Wimax (Mountian View, San Fran), developing Map and Location Based Services based on the epic Google Earth and Google Maps and are even partnering with Sun Microsystems to offer the Java Runtime Environment to people who want to develop applications which could be used by Google and perhaps more interestingly for the rest of us, OpenOffice, an open source office suite (much like Microsoft Office) which is free to download. These and other partnerships and application development projects are all designed to get under our skin, making them indispensible which frankly, is and will be correct for the mainstream consumer over the next 3 years, especially if the basic versions remain free. Once embedded in the Google consumer psyche, 'standard' and 'premium' versions of the applications will be monetized and, in my opinion, providing Google keeps the price low (ergo volume take up high) they will establish themselves as much more than the aforementioned 'one trick pony' and we really will see Google standardised as THE webtop.

Overall, such an exciting company to watch and one which i will come back to time and again.

In my next post on Google I want to spout about the potential damage it can cause to the world wide telecommunications industries with its land grab strategy and Google Talk.

Thoughts?

posted by blueboyeddie @ 12:53 am