Google Core Business Keeps Rising… But!
Once again every 3 months, we read a similar article. Google’s quarter revenue has exceeded expectations, and the stock price goes up again as always. Eric Schmidt talks in pride about how strong their core business is, and how it keeps getting stronger and stronger with time. This is really great, and I as a Google believer have no doubt about it. But what Mr. Eric is trying smartly to hide here is Google’s failure to generate revenue in any other type of business. Google Answers closed last year, Google Checkout is so bad it has rating 4.2 (up from 3/10 two months back) on CNET, Google Apps is also not getting the best of reviews they hoped for. Google is expanding in many areas, I’m not sure how successful they are with the new advertising channels they entered, but anything that has nothing to do with advertising is just not going through. A reason for some analysts to say Google has a weak business foundation that could collapse in any minute.
So how could Google really fall down? I don’t think that would happen anytime time soon, but with the next wave of evolution:
- New advertising mechanism that would outperform Google: Google so far is trying to get into what ever advertising model there is, so it’s very unlikely.
- New major advertising channel: Every month we hear of a new booming site that is having strong community gathering. Search engines rush in acquiring those startup sites. But if one day, a very strong solid community starts building it’s own advertising solution, and this is where Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon are trying to get into, they could start drawing advertiser’s attention quickly with competitive prices compared to how keyword price keeps rising at Google.
- Google Killer, and I mean Google Search Engine killer. Since once you have that, many people are likely to ignore all the other Google features and just stick with what you have. Every year new search engines come (and go). We have seen Accoona, Ms. Dewey, the European Search Engine project, and many others who are trying to implement human like queries as well, something that Google have yet to seriously invest in sometime soon. There is no real threat in the horizon what so ever, but continued attempts mean someday someone will hit the target, and then that might be it.
These are all just thoughts I have about Google and where they’re heading, despite how much I love and admire Google’s value and what they have to offer. What do you think?
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Trust me, Google is doing all they can to promote their new service, but Google has an image and trust it needs to maintain. Google started once to display hints to use Google Docs, Google Calendar, Picasa and others. However, this was considered a lost of trust in Google, since search results are supposed to return most relevant results, and some ads beside. Promoting their own services is a contradiction of their Do No Evil slogan as many see it. This has pushed Google it seems to remove the feature. Read here for more insight from Firefox creator.
I think the only problem Google could be facing is that no-one really knows how big it is. To everyone, Google is just a search engine. The most popular one, for some reason, they say, and they use it. If they expanded, they should TELL people they expanded.
But like you said, they face opposition if other people are going for hit-or-miss. I dunno. It really depends on how well other companies are doing in their experiments.