Hello everyone,
I know that there thousands of critics and views on Google. Lately most of them point towards comparing Google either to Apple or to Microsoft. I thought I would put together my view on why I really appreciate what Google is doing. At the same time putting things into perspective of what Microsoft and Apple did too.
If you think about it Google has become in the last 10 years one of the most successful companies in the world. How did they do it? Here is the story from a Technical perspective…
Here is my view on the great technical milestones that they achieved which paved the road to their success:
- Google Search… beats yahoo coming out of the .com crash. Why? Because it was easy, simple no adverts, powerful, quick and appealing.
- Google creates gmail… Which is by invitation only! Great Marketing trick, you could only get a gmail account if a friend of yours gave you one… result… it was fashion to have a gmail mail account. Everyone wanted it! They were one of the first to say well you can have 1Gb of email storage: and each day it would grow slowly. People really thought this was a great thing which made it even more appealing. Several people at the time drew tha analogy between money growing and gmail space growingl.
- This was a period where google grew popularity and made their hiring process aimed at the very best… true engineers. It actually attracted a certain type of person, I would even say border line: geeks only. This proved to be a fundamental part of their success.
- Google maps becomes a reality. Independent if they bought this idea or not they managed to integrate it with Google search. Google Earth the next step was a HUGGEEE success. Around the world people were searching their homes, cities trying to see their pasts.
- With Google maps the whole world wanted to be on it, have their own place, and since Google has never been scared of overwhelming amounts of data they embraced this and said thank you to everyone.
- Of course there were multiple versions of Google earth came out, but the idea of having layers, measuring seeing anything anywhere in the world well that was a huge breakthrough. So they still grew even further.
- The company philosophy at this stage and still is today that everyone has 20% time off to be creative, which is amazing. With this free time there were several projects growing and becoming successful. The famous Google Labs was a reality. A very successful one. Innovation drives companies!
- Google decided to map entire libraries online… this got them into trouble but still is a valuable resource for them. Google Scholar and Google Read are examples of what came out of Google Labs.
- Google goes for YouTube, huge purchase but at the end of the day this was a great win for them. Not only web search, geographical search but now video were under their control. It is also integrated into their Google Video.
- At this stage critics begin to worry on the speed that the company is growing… but what do they do? Google Documents/Calendar all come together integrated with gmail.
- The concept of having gmail as a hard drive or even using the web as a development environment comes back to reality. The push the documents, spreadsheets, forms, colanders, drawing, presentations all online for free. Because it is for free Microsoft isn't worried…
- Then of course the idea of having their own browser becomes a reality… why? to better integrate online development in their way. A baby step to creating their own OS. At the time it was a myth or a rumour that Google would ever create their own OS.
- Google Chrome took the world by surprise, the fastest, easiest, simplest Browser… and guess what… that is what the world wanted. IE was too heavy. Firefox still had the majority because of the flexibility, so who ended up loosing users?! Microsoft!!!
- All of sudden Google becomes a threat do Microsoft.
- In a few years Google then launches: Google finance, on a par with yahoo finance…if not better in many ways.
- they give the possibility to the world to use their graphs open source!!! This is great because there has never been an easy way of plotting online. They created it for Google Finance and let the world use it… great:)
- Google also made available to the world of who and how people used Google itself with Google insight…. get a report of how many times someone types in a key word in your region. That report of course has the same graphs as Google Finance.
- Given that their main activities or revenue came from advertisement, they said hey why don't we let anyone use us and we will pay individuals… for revenue we get… What an idea!? Adsense was born and their revenue skyrocket. AdWords was the natural extension to this.
- With Adsense of course tools were needed on their side to analyse web traffic… so they then make Google Analytics available for the world!!!! Everyone could create and track web traffic to their websites companies. What a success that was! What a great service for free!
- On the Social networking front Google purchases Blogger. People could now create their own blogs… a baby step to Google sites. Google now would also allow one to create their own websites. Giving people a VERY simple approach to this. At the beginning no one really thought anything about this but…they had a hidden agenda… they wanted to be able to create intranets for companies!!! This was the first baby step. When Facebook became so popular they came up with Buzz. Not that powerful in comparison until you tie that together with where people post thing. Now they have a true advantage over Facebook from a marketing perspective.
- Of course their next great achievement, not sure if this happen before blogger was purchased was Picassa!!! This appeared at a very similar time to Flicker. What was powerful was that because gmail had the space, every user could upload all their pictures and share them with the world. Web Albums now existed!!!
- Picassa was also born to help integrate that process of uploading and managing the albums online. The interesting thing was that Google had other plans for picassa… integrating it with blogger, making simple image processing algorithms for the pictures. This was great and simple to use. No one really predicted where it was going….
- Today Picassa identifies faces and you search your photos based on faces… not only that you can tie your photos to positions which can be placed on Google maps AND your contacts can automatically have pictures that you took. GREAT!!!
- Google then realized that Microsoft still had a competitive advantage: Messenger, there were and are many instant messaging services around the world… but Google noticed that most companies could block Messenger or AOL or Skypess due to the ports and settings… So they took email and converted it into the Google Chat. Now everyone who had gmail, which at this stage is most of the world could talk online via there email account to their friends. No company could block this without blocking all emails!
- Recently they added the capability to add video feeds from webcams and now you can even make phone calls to mobile numbers… Skype watch out. Google has now taken on Skype with one huge hammer!
- Street view was the next amazing thing, even thought Microsoft had something similar, the moment that Google had was overwhelming and when they brought out street view around the world… well everyone was crazy about it…Google sends cars around the world to take pictures of all the streets and then allows you to see your street! This was the next step to the Google Maps. No one at the time really realized that this was the building block to take out TomTom, with their own Navigation program. Now you could get directions on Google maps from A to B (recognizing all the places that people put on there) but now you could get pictures of the intersections where you need to turn. Not just a map but a real life photo!
- There was more to come… Android.. the Google OS for mobile phones. Now this was a surprise because the mobile phone market was really dominated by Nokia (Symbian) developed from QT, BlackBerry and of course the iPhone3. Windows CE was clearly struggling here. So what/how/why did Google take this on? At the time a lot of people did not really believe that this would be a reality or a good idea….But looking back they had this GREAT idea. I believe the thought process was as follows: we will never bring Windows down for desktops, but for mobile device the market is full BUT nothing is for free… And free is where Google rules.
- Android was created, now the powerful thing was that they said you know what anyone can and should be able to develop things for a phone. They opened Pandora's box. Apple wanted to keep control over this but Google launched Android and allowed the world to contribute. At this stage they have embraced JAVA (Apple disregarded JAVA from Sun now Oracle), for the plotting their online services, wanted to work cross platform, and people began to show some curiosity. Nothing special. Not an easy battle. But within 2 years of this, Google took a lot of good ideas coming from Apple, and made their OS attractive for Mobile phone companies: its free, easy to use, you can integrate gmail, calendar, pictures, movies, GPS, download any app, its easy to use, multitasking, it will improve faster than any other OS…and ANY mobile phone provider can use it…. HTC jumps on this and starts to sell phones with Windows and Android. At the beginning clearly iphone was still way ahead of the game, the look the style, the ease of use. All of which Google embraced and is moving faster than Apple I would say…
- Samsung then realizes that Android is powerful enough to use, and they bring out the Galaxy. This is a turning point. It beats the iphone, on techs, ease of use, and it on par with the iPhone4…Just cheaper and anyone can use.
- The important thing here that due to Googles moment of the last 10 years people really get on board and took it serious. Android supports JAVA, flash, and it integrates all of Googles products better than you would expect: picassa, google chat, google talk, Google earth, Navigation + street view (ooohhh by the way be careful TomTom), calander, email, contacts, documents, spreadsheet…
- And of course the concept of the iTunes which worked so well for Apple… Google decided to create Market place… and guess what it is growing exponentially faster than the iTunes store.
- All of this is interesting however the concept that I notice is that Google took on the iPad at the same time… so tablet PCs could also have an OS based on Android, but now ANY hardware provider could use it…What does this mean, tablet PCs are faster, slick and can be used as large phones… iPad was a huge success but did not support flash or have have a web camera. Google was not bound to this and because any HW provider could use the OS… Samsung and many others have begun to use Android for Tablets not only mobile phones…
- The question I ask myself now… is what about desktops… well if you can have a tablet PC running android what is stopping you have your desktop to the same? Microsoft…takes another huge hit!
- Some people always state well Google is always aimed at the user and not really for companies so Microsoft will always be alright… well a couple of years ago that changed. Google create Google apps which is basically the whole Google tool chain that could be installed on internal server for companies so no data would be exchanged with the real world. It is cheaper, easier to use that than what Microsoft provides. I agree that it is perhaps not scalable today but due the the huge success of Google the integration of ERPs, finance tools, marketing tools, email, tracking graphs, makes it so attractive for start-up companies. So now most start up companies embrace this as web pages can be created quickly and easily, pictures, documentation, shared and stored (actually SharePoint be careful). version control on top of all of this comes for free.
- So what is the next step for Google? Well my personal favourite is Google Goggles, so with your phone one can always take a picture, but Google then scans it and search based on the photo, weather it is bar code, a art, a street, a name, a picture… it is all there. What an amazing way of searching.
- If you integrate Google translator into this the sky is the world… say you are in a different country you see a billboard in the street, take a picture it gets translated automatically for you and you find out where where that show, movie is showing and for what price!!!!
Given all of these technical functionalities that Google provides what is the catch?! Well the truth is, Microsoft has been a dominant player in the software world with no real competition for several years, it is really good to see someone step up. The problem is that Windows is GREAT, and everyone will use it. Specially windows 7, however if you take into account how Microsotf tried to copy Google with more resources with the MySpace concept they failed. And Google grew faster than anyone could imagine. They took advantage of the world giving them data. They just organized it. Of course with new monopolies there are always people who dislike this, and Google clearly is at that stage. Bing - Microsofts search engine tried to take out Google’s popularity and did to a certain point specially with their Bing Travel, but this is still only available in America. Microsoft has done some great things in the last decade but I for see that things might change….
With all of this there is the Apple story, which cannot be ignored in this analysis…Steve Jobs took a different approach… and did so very successfully, ipod, iphone,itouch, ipad, itunes, Quick Time, iMac, all of which were huge success. The Company really did reinvent it self which does not happen that often in the software world. How will Apple continue? Well they do look good their products are good and easy to use. Their name too has a huge moment that even Google cannot take on. An Apple Product says something and looks great wherever you put it. It works and is maintained by Apple guaranteeing that everything works. Apple only needs to support what it wants making it easier to maintain. But this comes at a cost. Google does not charge people so no one can really complain!
Let me finish this entry with one single question:
Have you ever given your credit card or any money directly to Google?
Gareth
