Reading the Google Tea Leaves

Every time Google comes out with a new prod­uct, many peo­ple talk about how great it is and high­light the prod­uct as a cat­e­gory killer. How­ever, it increas­ingly appears to me that Google is fill­ing up holes in their offer­ing, in an attempt to match its com­peti­tors. Based on that assump­tion, I started won­der­ing if Google had any prod­uct that was truly unique. To do so, I started a chart that mapped Google offer­ings against its com­peti­tors. For the pur­pose of this analy­sis, I decided that Google’s main com­peti­tors were Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AOL.

The Search Space

Google is undoubt­edly the leader in search. It is what they spe­cial­ized in and con­tin­ues to be their most cher­ished asset. But does Google offer search prod­ucts that fill a niche which is not cov­ered by its com­peti­tors? Let’s take a look…

The inter­est­ing thing, when look­ing at this data, is that, apart from Cat­a­log and Usenet search, Google does not offer ser­vices offered by oth­ers or cur­rently under devel­op­ment. Inter­est­ingly, Google does not have any offer­ings in the Audio (nor a Pod­cast offer­ing) and Ency­clo­pe­dia space (although Wikipedia results some­times pop-up in search results.) This seems to high­light two poten­tial areas where Google will intro­duce new prod­ucts: an audio search engine, which will include pod­casts, and some type of part­ner­ship with Wikipedia to fill the ref­er­ence space.

What is inter­est­ing here is that Google has gen­er­ally been the first to mar­ket with many of the search col­lec­tions listed. From this, one can deduce that Google works more as a com­pet­i­tive threat to its com­peti­tors, forc­ing them to invest more in their search prod­uct and, in the process, improv­ing the qual­ity and breadth of search data for every user on the Inter­net. This is a good thing but not rev­o­lu­tion­ary unto its own.

Search Ser­vices

The next area I decided to look into, in order to divine the whats and wheres of Google was the type of search-specific ser­vices it offered, com­pared to the same competitors.

This is actu­ally inter­est­ing in that the offer­ings are pretty close. Of note here is a depar­ture on the part of Microsoft, which is exper­i­ment­ing with clus­tered search. None of its com­peti­tors have show a prod­uct in that space and this may be an inter­est­ing indi­ca­tion of how they plan to play in that space.

Also of note is the fact that only Google offers a paid answer­ing ser­vice (Google Answers). A ques­tion for play­ers in that space could be whether some­thing like the recent Mechan­i­cal Turk offer­ing from Ama­zon could help a com­pany fill that niche. This seems to be an untapped mar­ket that is only being mined by Google.

Non-search ser­vices

OK, so we can clearly see that Google has done a good job in the search space and its com­peti­tors are work­ing hard to play catch up in that area. While they’re doing so, Google has been busy ramp­ing up its offer­ings and clos­ing some holes in terms of being an online media player. Let’s take a look at how it is fair­ing in the non-search space.

Of note in that area is the fact that Google has man­aged to revamp the email space with its Gmail offer­ing, forc­ing Yahoo! and Microsoft to work on a revamp of prod­ucts user-interface that had not really evolved much since their intro­duc­tions. A cou­ple of inter­est­ing holes in the Google offer­ings in terms of auc­tions and cal­en­dar­ing will prob­a­bly be filled in the near future with online offer­ings clos­ing the gap in those areas. Heck, even peo­ple work­ing at some of their com­peti­tors are clam­or­ing for such offer­ings.

More inter­est­ing, how­ever, is the fact that Google is the only player in that space with­out a sub­stan­tial access offer­ing. Basi­cally, they’ve been using the pub­lic inter­net as their acces­si­bil­ity world. This can pro­vide some details as to the recent rumors of their devel­op­ing a large scale WiFi net­work and some of their inter­est in pur­chas­ing dark fiber or other rumors about their inter­est in AOL.

Once again, it seems that Google has served well as spurring its com­peti­tors into action but the magic Google sauce does not seem to reside in the prod­uct offerings.

Devel­oper Services

While all those offer­ings seem of inter­est to the gen­eral pub­lic, Google has been doing a good job in cater­ing to early adopters, who gen­er­ally impact gen­eral opin­ion. When doing a com­par­i­son on that space, it was fas­ci­nat­ing to see that Google took the lead in most cat­e­gories and that AOL did not even play in any of them.

That last item is one to pon­der. Google is not in the host­ing busi­ness yet. But it seems that there is poten­tial for them and, once again, could play along the lines of Google try­ing to har­vest dark fiber. They’ve rev­o­lu­tion­ized the online email space by offer­ing a larger amount of disk space than any com­peti­tors. It seems they could be doing the same in the host­ing space by offer­ing a com­bi­na­tion of easy to set-up and update tools (based on the blog­ger set of tem­plates) with some more pow­er­ful fea­tures like Data­base man­age­ment (the rumored Google­Base, which now has its own URL, even though the code still seems to be sit­ting behind a login area.

Con­clu­sions

Google does inno­vate in some spaces but has largely inno­vated in order to gain entry in mar­kets that already existed. As a rule of thumb, they’ve been very smart at breath­ing new inno­va­tions in those mar­kets. How­ever, their com­peti­tors are gen­er­ally quick to notice and are catch­ing up.

In terms of future offer­ings, I would not be sur­prised to see the fol­low­ing prod­ucts com­ing from Google over the next few months:

• An audio search engine, which will include a pod­cast­ing com­po­nent (and pos­si­bly a pod­cast author­ing com­po­nent via blogger)
• A strate­gic part­ner­ship with Wikipedia or some other encyclopedia
• Some type of clus­tered search offering
• A cal­en­dar prod­uct, which will prob­a­bly inject new life in that space
• An auc­tion offer­ing, tied with an inter­nal pay­ment system
• A web host­ing ser­vice that will scale from small enti­ties to large ones and will include Gmail as part of the email offering
• Some type of access ser­vice, prob­a­bly using their WiFi solution

Whether that all hap­pens of course is pure spec­u­la­tion on my part and whether it is enough to sus­tain their mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion (north of $100 bil­lion as I write this) is some­thing I bet­ter leave to peo­ple who know how to invest.

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