2005-11-16
multiple games all interfering with each other
Ben raises a couple of points about how future-monopolies like google are going to leave the 'market' and head for greener pastures. but I'm not sure that this is going to be the case here.
This is what I see the internet as far as consumers go.
There are two ways to get consumers to part with their money. One is directly via offering them a product or service, the other is indirectly via advertising.
Google competes in the advertising space for the most part, it really isn't too interested in blogs, or web stats. it is after increased click throughs on it's ads. It is seeking to grow this by getting the user to see more of them.
but by pursuing their strategy of 'borging' every little market they might be creating a bigger problem for themselves.
Complementors with nothing to lose.
Lets bring up a list of people they have pissed off so far. (by pissed off I mean taken all or part of their revenue or 'value add' away)
- media companies (via news.google.com)
- shopping comparision sites (froogle)
- yahoo/msn (search, mail, IM)
- startups (technorati/pubsub et al)
- telcos (google talk)
- ISPs (free wifi)
- banks/credit companies? (google pay is supposed to be around the corner)
- VC firms who funded the startups, and who are looking at lower demand for their services (no startups == no VC money == no profits)
so.. imagine a rectangle.
- you have a bunch of smart innovative people in one corner
- a bunch of 'smart' money in another
- companies with 'political connections' in another
- companies with the eyeballs in the other
- and some companies with enabling technologies sitting in the middle.
all with one common aggressive competitor.
Is google about to face a cold russian winter similar to what happened to Germany in WWII?
If I were yahoo or microsoft I would be putting aside their differences and be approaching the banks and telcos for a exclusive revenue share, while getting the VC's to pay the media companies to put
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /
and provide a custom API with strings attached to it, so that it makes hard for google to fully utilize it, while the others won't have an issue. (natural selection via price discrimination)
All the while getting the innovators to leverage the yahoo and msn framework (not a single company in any one spot.. you want competition) to build their next app with.
The trick is how to split the pie so that everyone is better off than they were with google in the market.
So to summarise.. google is forcing people to compete against it by taking all the pie for itself instead of sharing it.