Ashish’s World!

I have read more than a few posts and articles in the last few days including many New Year bold predictions that Google will not do as well in the year ahead. Not only this - topics around Google are one of the most talked about casual topics that are discussed today - be it conferences, software company parties or general hangout (geek hangout) places. There are people who appreciate Google a lot but, in the last few days, I have heard more people having a lot of different (and not necessarily positive) opinions about the company.

If I list out the arguments against Google, I can broadly classify those into following points:

• No Migration costs: There really isn’t any migration costs from Google to any other search engine as soon as somebody provides a ‘better’ product. This is really true to a large extent since all I need to do is to start typing something else instead of ‘Google’ in my browser address-bar. They don’t really have a developer eco-system around their products the way Microsoft does.
• Too many unfinished products: Google has come up with so many unfinished products and kept them in perpetual Beta that they have started to lose credibility and the ‘cool’ factor. Of course - it is very nice to come up with cool product betas but it is even more important to finish the job and make it really live. You can’t always give the excuse of the product being in Beta for the unfinished features. It takes a lot to actually ‘release’ the product and provide support for it. It’s time that Google start doing it (and take the pain) and keep up their credibility in the market.
• Flaky Business model: Apart from selling ads, there are a very few concrete ways that Google is making money. Agreed that they make very substantial amounts selling ads, they do need to figure out alternate ways of making money too.
• Google turning evil: This is actually funny. They have started to do exactly those things for which they were criticising Microsoft. If you start to do everything on your own and try to kill all other smaller companies trying to do something innovative in the space - there is no way that you will not be called ‘evil’ . There, actually, is a website which asks whether Google is evil or not!

Having said all that, let me be fair to Google and list out the real good things about them. But before that, let me clarify that I am not a great fan of Google and I agree with most of the above points. At the same time, I really think that Google deserve a lot of respect because they have shown the world a few things that have changed the Internet a bit:

• Ad revenues can sustain software development: This is the first and the foremost thing that they have shown to the world! Web based advertisements have been a major source of revenues even in the pre-Google days. But nobody really demonstrated that it is something that can sustain the software development and look - in what ways.
• There always is a scope for improvement: Before Google came, Yahoo had done a pretty decent job of organizing the web into directories. And Yahoo was decently big then - yet Google came up with a nice product that replaced Yahoo as the default place to look for information. This is an excellent example to let people know that when it comes to building a software product, there always are better ways and if you build a good technology, it is bound to be used. Internet is a great equalizer. Skype is yet another example where a good technology scored above all other big players in the market.
• Changing the rule of the game is fair and works: There is a popular saying that if you can’t win the game with a set rules, you should just change the rules of the game. Google did see that it’s difficult to snatch the market-share from Microsoft on the desktop, so they changed the game by targeting the web. They have been pretty successful at that and the ‘Windows Live‘ initiative proves that Microsoft acknowledges that threat.

To sum up, I believe that Google has a great product and accumulated a lot of cash reserves, but it’s unfair to compare them with Microsoft. Google, hardly, is a threat to Microsoft. It’s very very hard for any company to displace Microsoft from their position because of the developer eco-system that Microsoft has (Disclaimer: I am a ex-Microsoft). Unless Google does something (I am sure they have put in thoughts around this - I will not be the first person to tell them these things) drastically different, they cannot keep riding on the ‘cool and great company’ tag. I will give Yahoo a far greater chance of success than Google in the next Internet era.