Undoubtedly, Google has cornered the market on online search engines. People laugh if you bring up Ask Jeeves these days, Google is the simplest and the best search engine there is. It's built into the Mozilla Firefox browser, as a matter of fact. Google's adWords and search engine advertising has built the company into an economic powerhouse. The problem arises when the guys at Google try to overstep their bounds.
I recently read a book entitled The Origin of Brands by Al Reis. In it, he talks about the danger of spreading a company or a brand too thin. For example, GM had countless lines of cars (Chevy, Buick, Cadillac, GMC, Pontiac, Hummer, Saturn) and because of this, didn't have the direction it needed to continue to succeed when people stopped buying cars. Since then, they have spun off Hummer, Saturn, and Pontiac.
This overexpansion is the biggest threat to Google, in my mind. E-books is an industry that already has a clear leader (Amazon), which could be a waste of the Google brand. When people begin to forget that Google is the best search engine in favor of their other products, they may begin to have a problem.
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Adam,
ReplyDeleteYou make some good points about moving away from the Google brand. They do a lot of great things, but sometimes one more product line is just that. As long as they stay within a "core" industry I think they will remain on top. I'm not sure how the whole e-books thing works for Google, but at the very least it aligns with their search engine finding appropriate information. I know it has helped me with some research assignments.
I agree with your point on Google's overexpansion. I think they have too much out there and they need to narrow their scope down to a couple of key products and services so they can continue to stay on top.
ReplyDeleteI see you point with the fear of over expansion of Google. Sometimes juggling with too many things at once gets dangerous especially in business; things can get risky. However, I don't have that much concern in Google simply because of its brand and image in the industry.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it's impossible for google to be good in every product or industry . so yes they should narrow their interests and focusing in products that have lager impact on the internet culture.
ReplyDeleteI agree that conglomerations aren't a good thing. As every organization have something else it's associated with, no matter how unrelated the organization itself are to eachother, the less it's concerned with it's original business.
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