Sunday, December 05, 2010

Google's Failure To Purchase GroupOn Shows Google Is No Monopoly

Groupon logo.Image via WikipediaFacebook is the most serious competition Google ever faced, and Facebook is not your classic search engine, it is not a ten blue links company. Although it is blue!

Look at how Facebook has gone after Google by not going after Google like one bull after another. The web as a whole is too fluid a place, too open to innovation for any company to manage to pull a monopoly on there.

It is widely believed Google missed out on social. It has made repeated attempts to "get" social and has failed. It continues to make attempts. I think it will fail again. Google Plus One is a lousy name. How about that!

Google is playing second fiddle also in the local and location space, although it is doing much better there than in the social space.

What after local and location? What after mobile? Those spaces are so hot with sizzle that it is hard to look beyond. These spaces carry at least five years of sizzle. What next is too early to ask.

Like the old saying, yesterday is gone, tomorrow is not here yet, but today, this day is yours. The party is on social, local, location, mobile and global. This party is going to last.
CNN: Google's Groupon groping reveals the shifting power in the web world: Groupon, a site by all accounts offering far less sophisticated technology ..... Social and local are not getting any less valuable. ..... the issue now is not what Google's willing to spend, it's about what kind of company it has become ..... Media organizations, most prominently the New York Times, that rely on Google's search results for their traffic are in the same boat as YouTube: They have experienced huge search-based traffic growth, but poor profitability ..... companies that have emerged on the back of Facebook's social discovery platform: Zynga and Groupon, to name the two biggest, are wildly profitable ...... evolution of search advertising into targeted and highly effective social advertising. ...... A war is brewing between the open and closed webs, and the poles around which companies are aligning seem to be Google on one side, and Facebook on the other. ..... the trick Facebook has pulled is that it doesn't feel like a walled-off world on the web ..... the stream is generated only because they've shared so much data with Facebook to begin with ..... Google is increasingly feeling like less of a value add. In its quest to be open, it's stopped feeling like a smart filter that brings the most relevant parts of the web to users of its search, and more like the actual wild, woolly, untameable raw web itself. .... twentysomethings and all teenagers .... Google is their AltaVista, their baseline Internet from which things can (and must) only get better. ..... Though only 30, Mason .... Why -- given his company's profitability and his personal wealth -- would he subject Groupon to the company that killed Dodgeball, bungled Yelp, and screwed up almost all of its own social efforts, from Buzz to Wave? .... Google is facing its first serious re-orienting as a company ..... Core search will have to be marginalized to make social and local the heart of the operation. (Its mobile and OS efforts essentially amount to parallel operations in the company ..... if Google can figure it out.
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