Google’s Six-Front War | Hacker News Reader

Google’s Six-Front War

techcrunch.com

47 pointstilt29 comments

As I commented on Techcrunch I see it quite different. The only place Google is attacked is search. That’s going on for years and so far neither Bing nor anyone else has made any real progress. Also the whole idea that „people moving slowly from search to discovery” is so far only speculation and I don’t buy it. Besides being quite cumbersome to ask my friends there are many areas where I just don’t “trust” them. For example IMDB is much better in predicting if I will like a certain movie than anyone of my friends is (or even all of them combined).

On all other fronts Google is not attacked but is attacking. They started from zero in pretty much all the fields you are mentioning a couple of years ago and have recently made some impressive gains (especially Android and Chrome). So it’s not Google who is facing challenging test but Microsoft (Office, Windows, IE, WP7… ), Apple (Iphone, OSX), Facebook/Tumblr/Quora and Yelp/Groupon. Google could afford to lose all these battles but search, some of the other players can’t…

Very, very well said. I'll add a view I heard from an analyst a few years ago. Even accounting for Google's non-search duds, collectively these projects _are_ Google's marketing/branding efforts. What's better for (arguably) the world's leading tech company, a Superbowl ad or self-driving cars, Wave, and +? Certainly a lot more effective than It's You.

> They started from zero in pretty much all the fields you > are mentioning a couple of years ago

They did not start from zero neither with Android (bought Android Inc. in 2005, the company itself was started in 2003) nor with Chrome (they did not write WebKit from scratch).

I think what the poster means by "started from zero" is that Google wasn't in the space. Then it was.

The means by which they entered the space (building on open source, acquisition, wish from genie) doesn't matter.

Right, I was referring to zero market share.

Well, then Apple is not worth mentioning in this context: they also started from zero with iPhone, and I'd say even more so.

It would be interesting to know what those disagreeing think. Google had zero market share, but they did not start Android, they bought it and finally released.

Apple had zero market share and developed the OS and the hardware themselves.

What do I miss?

To your original point, Apple's WebKit didn't come from nowhere either. It was a fork of KHTML from the KDE project.

Where do you see the that point? Did I claim Apple started with Safari from zero? I did not.

Apple released before Android, and obliterated the market. Apple attacked the incumbents in the phone market at that time, Nokia, rim, palm, Windows. Android then entered the market, and "attacked" all of the incumbents again, which at this time includes Apple. Thus, as the last major entrant, it can be said that Android is fundamentally an offensive against all of the other preexisting platforms.

Similarly with the browser, Chrome is the "latest entrant", the latest challenge to the incumbents of ff, ie, safari, opera.

In each case, being the latest entrant, Google is not in the position of protecting market share from new entrants, they are in position of taking market share from incumbents.

This will change over time, as Google market share matures, and new entrants and or older incumbents make moves, but for now, as the latest major platform introduced, it can be said Google is acting in an offensive manner from each markets point of view. I think rather than "starting from zero" alone, the real context meant was "most recent to start from zero".

  > the latest challenge to the incumbents of ff, ie, safari,
  > opera.

To be fair, market share of Safari and Opera (in the west at least) were not and are not something to brag about.

Regarding Search, it's impressive how far Google is. Blekko, Bing, Yahoo fails with good results in queries including few keywords.

I don't know why we don't have good Web Search Engine Benchmarks.

Think about the benchmark for a while. What kind of benchmark would it be? How would you score? How could you tell if someone was cheating?

It's a guidance, not an absolute measure. For example I find that queries with more than 5 keywords are fat better in Google than in other search engines. In this case you can take some web sites with high web ranking and try searches with many keywords against them.

How do you define high web ranking? And why to limit your 5 keyword benchmark queries on such sites?

One of the key features for me in a search engine is that it searches data from as many sources as possible.

There is a benchmark of search engines over Russian internet, and its results seem to actually mean something. http://analyzethis.ru/?&lang=en

Agreed. The more interesting question is: how will the others respond?

I see Google's attacks (especially +) as a big win for Microsoft. Only determined competition could cause the other players to look for partnerships with them. Ie: Nokia in mobile, Facebook in social (Skype just the beginning). Google is making Microsoft relevent again.

Good point.Can add Yahoo to the list too.

I think that's going to play an ever greater role in Google's expanding plans. They're pissing a lot of established companies off by competing with free, and mostly, quite simply better products. This is great for consumers because it kicks competition up a notch - but it could lead to the other companies, now having a common enemy, to partner up against Google. We recently saw this in the Nortel case.. FB comments include Yahoo, Bing includes Facebook, Nokia includes WP7, the list goes on and on. Lots of turkeys do make an eagle - Even if Google alone is better than all the other players in the market, as long as they're alone they'll quickly face pretty serious resistance.

If you want to use a war analogy, Google isn't really fighting a 6 front war at all. They're sitting comfortably in their search advertising castle, and playing guerrilla warfare everywhere else.

Google is attacking Apple/Facebook/Microsoft with free products, and is betting their entire company that they will win by attrition, or that their search revenue will continue to fund their efforts.

They're also making a lot of enemies in the progress. They run the risk as well of being perceived to be getting stale which has plagued MS for the past decade. A potential mounting list of failures doesn't help a reputation.

> They're sitting comfortably in their search advertising castle, and playing guerrilla warfare everywhere else.

Don't ever think Google is playing guerrilla warfare just to poke fun at the other guys while sitting on a pile of cash. The reason Google is attacking these companies is simple: they have become clear threats to Google's core business - not search, but targeted advertising on the web. Apple's race to dominance to the mobile space with its walled-garden approach and app- and vertical-search-based model were threatening the whole open, web-based and ads-driven model; Microsoft's stronghold on browser market with an ancient browser was holding the web hostage and killing the potential of web as a service serving platform; Facebook keeps valuable information that is not accessible to Google bot and may even be able to develop the next big thing to replace search, not to mention that it is sucking the best talent; and it has been very clear that local advertising is where the future growth of targeted advertising will be from.

Google is being offensive and aggressive, and they are not comfortable about it when their core business - not search but serving ads - is being threatened.

Well said, a very good analysis.

Not directly related to the topic but.. does anyone else find this "war", "peace" etc used in a blog post, to discuss competition in the business world, overly dramatic and annoying?

Indeed. The press seems intent on framing any attempt to create a great product as an effort to make war against whoever is currently in the space.

There is a great many lines of text written about tech giants like Google and Microsoft, but at the end of the day the reality is more simple then interesting. I remember Wired ran a similarly article about Microsoft some years ago (Linux, Gooogle, Firefox, etc. - war on all fronts).

At the end of the day, Google gets most of it's money from advertising, Microsoft from Office/Windows lock-in, Amazon from e-commerce, etc.

The one company that really turned it's self on it's own head was Apple, but I don't see any of the above companies (needing to) do anything so radical any time soon.

While Android may have more installs, they don’t have the developer community to build killer apps because the Android marketplace (both for hardware and firmware) is highly fragmented, whereas iOS is about symphonic convergence.

This seems overly reductive. First, the Android marketplace is quickly catching up with Apple's, at least in terms of number of apps. Second, it's not clear at all that fragmentation is the reason it's taken this long to do so.

No mention of advertising?

indeed. this whole article seems fairly naive.

if you want to stick with the article's war analogy, google isn't fighting a six-front war. they're fighting a single-front war (advertising) with six weapons. if all six weapons work exactly as they're supposed to, google will be sitting pretty. if even five of the six turn out to be failures, google still wins.

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