Google Business Model

location based services

The venerable pastors of the church of Google pastors propagate “you need not do evil to make money” and want people to believe in it because they have written a letter and put it onto a web site that says so and the web site has a Google logo to it. Maybe we should try that too and see an increase in our market capitalization – of course we are doing no evil in our business. (However some churches may argue that all businesses are evil, but we will ignore that assessment).


I don’t think this argument is going to help in the long run to make money because in a lot of culture what they are doing may actually be evil. Certainly opening mail and reading it is one of them, digitizing library is another one of them, eavesdropping is another one of them, selling shares for profit is another one, and not accepting that all this is evil is another.



Google according to me has a plan which is similar to what Yahoo used to have and what Sun used to have (Think Network is the computer) and neither of them went on to become the no. 1 company. Google is not competing in Microsoft space they are competing in Sun & Yahoo space and more importantly they are trying dominance in an industry where loyalty is not there or extremely transient. Let me put up a case why



They have a search engine which is good, but a few years back Yahoo used to have such an engine and I cannot be sure that tomorrow they would have the best search engine. In fact what is interesting here is that the current assumption is that search engine is the center of the internet, it may be today, it may not be tomorrow. I am sure some PhD somewhere in the world is figuring out another “best” way to organize content on the internet without a search engine, and the vulture capitalists are waiting to bankroll his venture. For example if I use web to find out which is the best restaurant to eat in Seattle I do a search which says “best place to eat in Seattle” I get a result, and if I am aunt Hilda I would click the first one, unfortunately this first result does not have Mexican as one of the food category, so I change this to “best place to eat Mexican in Seattle” and I get another answer. So web is not the best way to go looking for the answer, I would call my Mexican friend and ask him, and it would be faster. Maybe I will use VoIP messenger though he is in a business where he does not have to use a computer.
They have an IM client, Yahoo has one, MSN has one, AOL has one, ICQ has one, Rediff in India has one, some mom and pop website also have one. AOL was hugely successful and it is no longer, and nobody really knows which one is the most popular today. Yahoo has a radio which no one else has, and I listen to that, and I “trained” my wife to use it, but she discovered MSN Radio and is hooked to that according to her what Google talk lacks is a radio. Go figure.
Google Talk has a VoIP, Yahoo has VoIP, MSN Messenger has VoIP I hear that telecom companies have VoIP, and still telcos are selling more cellphones in US, China & India and they are becoming ubiquitous with rising revenues for telcos, and they are not doing VoIP.
They have a sidebar, I believe Yahoo has a sidebar in their messenger, those low hanging tabs where you can set news, weather, stock etc., if you look closer MSN Messenger also has one. Now for the techies and aesthetically minded people these things don’t count as these messenger guys don’t call it a sidebar and does not have a Google logo. Does not mean that all moms, dads, Harry and Tom would start installing sidebar because Google has made it. They have seen this before and they are not fascinated by it. They don’t need it, in the same way that I don’t have rings in my eyebrows.
Google has Froogle, Earth, Catalogs, Answers – I am not sure how many people use it and still not sure how many people would like to use it. I remember having a conversation with the marketing head of a local telco on what is the market size of location based services and his answer was he would have to put his hand out of the window to grab a number, till date they haven’t launched a LBS, though a simple service like ringtone download is the biggest Value Added Service for the telco.
Google has a library project which everybody thinks is devil incarnate, but I am surprised people think so, Google has written on the web site that business do not need to do evil to make money. Something is wrong somewhere. If people wanted to read books they would go to the library, read Fortune magazine where they explain Americans are not reading, and here is Google trying to digitize books in the American libraries, maybe they should try Indian or Chinese library.
Google wants Machine Translation of all the languages in the world – I am sure that’s a good thing, but I would like to believe aunt Hilda is not interested in knowing what Chinese papers printed as headline (in their language), heck she wouldn’t even be interested in knowing what USA Today published as headline.


So if I take this assumption that not all of 8 billion inhabitants of planet called earth are falling over themselves to go to Google to search the web and learn Chinese then at some point reality will catch up and Google’s P/E would return to a healthy 31, like all of the companies that don’t do evil in business. Till such time there would be a lot of products from Google that I don’t need (Like iPOD, SEGWAY, Playstation).



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