Ampers & Dot

During an awesome social media discussion yesterday, I found the meeting sidetracked by a humorously disgruntled conversation about the public perception of Google.  You’ve probably never heard of Google, so let me explain this thing to you.  The best way to put it it’s this super futuristic “website” where you words into a box and it does this little magic trick where it finds ways to sell you products around the words you entered. 

Anyway… the discussion of Google started around the fact that Gmail still has its cute little “BETA” tag on the logo.  What the hell’s that about?  Honestly, it’s about the public perception.  It’s GOOG’s way to trick you into thinking they are this cute little startup, open source company that is trying out a new free product for you to enjoy. 

Fact: Google isn’t a startup.  They were founded in mid ‘98, went public in ‘04 and currently have over 19,000 employees.

Our debate went on to discuss how Google has access to all practically all the data in the world and how it’s nearly impossible not to be evil with that much power.  Then we got to Google’s services and things got a little trickier.

We both admitted to using Gmail, Google reader, and obviously- the search engine.  And we both admitted that we were happy with the services.  The problem in all this being: Google is really, really good at what they do.  Similar to Microsoft’s Outlook- we use it because it’s perfectly functional.  If there were other options as appealing then we’d switch… well you know what?  There aren’t.

And there’s the problem: the discussion kept coming back to the line of “but until someone makes a better alternative, it seems like we’re stuck with Google”.  We both agreed that there is no point in penalizing ourselves just to fight the system.  This is like the year I ran Linux (Kubuntu, to be precise) on my laptop because I wanted to prove that there were better, cheaper, sleeker alternatives to Apple and Microsoft out there.  Well you know what?  There aren’t.

But here’s where things get even more interesting.  Think about a decade ago when AOL was one of the top email services.  Where are they now?  And what about Apple even?  A bit over a decade ago they had almost no market share, but just this week we learn that Apple holds down 32% of operating systems.  That’s just crazy!  And what it shows is that no size of grasp on an industry is safe. 

Google’s 70% share of online searches might be dominate today, but there is just no saying how we where we’ll go to search in the future.  Big Google might own the web now, but it’s fairly safe to say that the next players in the industry are likely infants in the space that can eventually grow into giant killers.  Because keep in mind that in 2007 Google had $16.6 billion in revenue, but just ten years ago today it didn’t even exist.

Or, Google keeps building, keeps buying, and keeps evolving until we live in the Googopoly where we browse on gPCs with gOSs and all Google Apps, while watch GoogleTV (with Google ads, of course), and using gCrowaves eating Google Toast.

And in all fairness: if these services are as good as the ones being cranked out now, it’ll actually be a pretty cool and highly functional world.