Sebastian Anthony:
[Google] wants to be more like Facebook and Apple, both of which have a completely-unified, walled-garden approach — and both of which are enjoying huge leaps in revenue and profits, while Google falls short of quarterly expectations. Nothing happens on an Apple device without Cupertino’s knowledge, and as a result Apple can perfectly tailor its devices for its users. Facebook enjoys unprecedented access to the surfing habits, likes, shares, and messages of its users. On the other side of the fence, with a slew of discordant, disconnected properties, Google seems to be flailing. “Search Plus Your World” and the March 1 privacy changes are simply the next step in Google’s (rather messy) attempt to weave everything together, before it loses any more ground.
Anthony’s article is a little histrionic, and there’s an eye-rolling assertion roughly every other paragraph. (In the one above, note the assertion that Apple watches everything its users do. Really? The closest one can come to that is pointing at iCloud, and unlike Facebook or Google, Apple has no advertising service to “enhance” by mining your data.)
However, what fascinates me about this article is that I think Anthony has come to the right conclusion by starting at the wrong premise. Here’s the premise:
Google has pushed in all of its chips in an epic gamble to beat Facebook at its own game. Google has abandoned its bread and butter in search of greener, tighter-targeted, socially-relevant pastures. The thing is, though, Google doesn’t actually have a choice in the matter. Going social is the right play. Indexed search has peaked. Apps — be it web apps or native mobile apps — are the future, and the only way to index them is through social sentiment, which Google can’t currently do… until it links all of its services together on March 1.
And the conclusion?
[Google is FUBAR because] it is biting the hand that feeds it. Indexed search might have peaked, but it’s still huge, and still propelled Google to over $10 billion in revenue this past quarter. To become Facebook, Google must forsake almost everything that brought it success in the first place. It must irreparably alter its fleet of successful web properties to become more Facebooky. It must alienate users with weird, ungooglesque features. It must force Chrome and Google+ down the throats of users who are simply looking for a brilliant search engine.
I think Anthony is correct about the path Google is taking and what the likely outcome from following it is. Where I disagree is the contention that Google has no choice.
What Google is doing, ultimately, is attempting to remake itself into a portal. Yahoo! is a portal and we know how well that’s worked out for them—and they’ve done a lot better than other portals from a decade ago did. (When’s the last time you visited Lycos? Did you know Lycos was even still around? It’s true!) On the surface, remaking themselves into a portal is clearly madness—but Google has a huge advantage the other companies don’t: the huge userbase, with the leading search engine and news site and groups and social networking and maps and—
—wait. That is Yahoo, isn’t it? Hmm.
While it’s a wee bit excessive to say, as Anthony did, that “Google has sold its soul to the capitalist devil,” there’s a truth in that excess: Wall Street doesn’t reward companies that merely turn in consistent profits quarter after quarter. Companies have to grow quarter after quarter. This relentless focus on growth nearly always punishes companies that take a “do one thing well” approach, unless the “one thing” they do well involves philosophy and process. You certainly see that in Apple, and I’d argue you see it to a large degree in Richard Branson’s Virgin Group.
But Google’s “one thing well” has historically been indexed search. While they’ve had “sticky” web applications like Gmail for years, their main focus has been enabling you to get off their site as fast as possible. Google still needs to be able to do that, but now they’ve also declared that they want to keep you on their site as much as possible. I don’t see how this can be reconciled.