Why Google Has To Be Evil
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 07:47PM Everyone's seen it coming, doomsayers have been heralding it since Google's founders first uttered the words... and now we've come to the end of "Don't Be Evil" and the beginning of a new era for Googlers and for most of the (non-Chinese) users of the Internet. Unless you've literally been disconnected for months, you're likely aware that Google has made sweeping changes across all the products it makes available, for free, to Internet users.
Since the inception of Google+, we've seen a fundamental transformation of every product line coming out of the $200BB company. Over the course of the last year, design changes have streamlined the "Google experience" into a uniform set of interfaces, new and more useful features have been rolled out, APIs and products that no one is using have been eliminated - these are all things that have been simultaneously lauded and criticized by the legions of people utilizing these services; but I think it's hard to argue that these are all things that smart and successful companies do: they cut out the waste and improve the product. They're trying to evolve to meet the market.
But the critics have now begun to claim that Google is doing things that it should not be doing. They're saying that the company is ignoring its fundamental principles, that it's no longer supporting its core business model or philosophy. Some have even gone so far as to develop a browser extension that shows how Google's "Search Plus Your World" strategy outright betrays its users by delivering them inferior search results.
What these people fail to understand is that Google is a bleeding whale surrounded by a bunch of really hungry great white sharks, and they're about to go on one hell of a feeding frenzy.
Seriously, look at what Google has to compete with:
- Facebook - More eyeballs are now glued to games, photos, videos, status items (and ads) in Facebook's walled garden than ever existed in AOL's walled garden. Facebook is going to IPO big, collect a huge pile of cash, and become Google's number one enemy in just a couple months. They're much more flexible, they've got close to a billion devoted users; who needs to search for anything when it's all right there in my Facebook?
- Twitter - The immediacy of streams of short, information dense messages on a ticker trumps anything coming out of Google's behemoth search index, and it's all information that's relevant to me and keeps me informed; I'll perform a Twitter search before I perform a Google search to get the latest news. What's happening? Not a Google search.
- Bit.ly - Short linking is self-selection. The links that bit.ly collects are ALL relevant, and the social graphs that tie them all together can be analyzed. That kind of human curated data will outshine anything the greatest PageRank algorithm ever invented can do; watch out for when bit.ly releases its social search, because it literally will be a Google search killer.
- Apple - Last, but hardly least, is the wunderkind company that just announced its ridiculous earnings. What's Google going to do when it butts up against a company with $100BB in CASH? That whole Android thing is starting to look like a real also-ran. Apple's hardware-based walled garden means that Google is going to get muscled out of the non-PC future; really all Apple would have to do is buy bit.ly and stick everything up its iCloud, and Google's future is looking none too shiny.
As you can see from most of the companies above, social wins every time when it comes to search; Apple of course is our "one of these things is not like the others" in the list above, and I congratulate Google for having the foresight to realize that market forces have all but killed the PC, but you can't outcompete a hardware manufacturer with software. Google should have started making their own phones and tablets and devices a long, long time ago - the Motorola deal is too little, too late.
So, it's obvious that Google needs social to compete. But despite Google's myriad forays into social (Orkut, Wave, Buzz) it has never had a real social winner - not until it forced a winner out of its guts by literally compelling all its users onto Google+ with their Google Profiles. Without social, Google is dead. And I mean completely dead in the water. It's only a matter of time before all the ad dollars previously spent on "search keywords" get sucked away into these social hyperchannels that can deliver ridiculously well targeted campaigns directly to people who are getting all the information they need from their friends.
When you look at things this way, you can see quite clearly that Google has no choice but to change its privacy policy to remove opt outs, to compel users to use their "real names", to delete relevant results from competing social networks from its search index, and essentially "pull a Microsoft" by forcing all of its users into using all of its services and linking all that user data together in Frankenstein-like fashion to attempt to mimic the same social network effects that have grown organically from those other (actually successful) social networks.
What other choice do they have? What frontiers are left for Google at this point? Google TV? Driverless cars? Outer space rocketships? Maybe they should just start applying for their government bailout now...
