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Google's Biggest Threat Is Google

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38 pointsdomino20 comments

"Google 'should stand for a beauty, technological purity of innovation and things that are important to people,' he said. It should also be a trusted brand, he said."

I love this statement, I just hope Google means it. I have a feeling Page does, as you never hear other big tech CEOs speak like this, but the "innovation" and "trusted brand" bits are debatable. Yes, Google is extremely innovative, but they show time and time again they're not above copycatting others' innovations, a concerning thing especially for startups. If you reach a point, it's either sell to Google or Google will enter the market and become your competitor (Dropbox is next up apparently). That's neither innovative or trusted.

To be fair, people have been talking about gdrive since way before dropbox. It's just that now is the right time, they have a successful mobile OS, google docs is taking off and chrome OS people need a hard drive. It was a given that they were going to release something like that if only for Chrome OS.

Also, Dropbox wasn't revolutionary because of what it was on paper. If you told me "file sync made easy" I would've been skeptical a few years ago. The simplicity of Dropbox's interface made it popular, not the actual concept. Which makes Google's "GDrive" a little more interesting as far as strategy. If I'm Google, I would want people to stop using Dropbox. Not because I want to make a competitor to Dropbox, but because I want more people on the web seeing my ads. If people get used to syncing their files effortlessly, they'll stop using web-based software and go back to the more responsive, feature-rich, and integrated desktop tools (eg MS Office vs Google Docs). Less people using the web = less revenue.

GDrive won't be a "drive." It will be an attempt to get rid of our notions of files and applications on our computers. Or at least that's my prediction. They won't bother making a Dropbox clone because it doesn't help them in any way if it's successful (it'll probably wind up costing them more money than it's worth) because Dropbox encourages users to use desktop apps and save files using a traditional file system on their computer.

They already tried that - it's Google Docs. It's been only moderately successful, so to boost adoption they're going to hook up a Dropbox interface to it and pick up all the Dropbox users that also have Google accounts.

>Yes, Google is extremely innovative, but they show time and time again they're not above copycatting others' innovations, a concerning thing especially for startups.

I agree that it's not nice to have that happen if you're the startup in question, but it can be good for users, and I'm not sure it contradicts Larry Page's statement. In order to innovate in a given market, you have to be in that market first. If someone else dominates that market, their features set the users' expectations, and copying them can help your competitive service get a foothold.

I largely agree...it can be good for users but can also scale back the innovation in that market due to Google's reach. A brand like Google can get to so many more users than a startup can. I'm amazed quite often by the number of people who don't know what Dropbox is. Yet, when Google enters this market, it'll be those people discovering GDrive and thinking "This is awesome! Why haven't I seen this before!" Competition drives innovation, definitely. Question is, who can innovate quicker and expand their market more rapidly, a startup or Google. Google has resources a startup does not. And for that, Google can often get to a controlling stake in the market, thereby controlling the innovation and halting that of the original business.

Google - a company I admire - relies heavily on monetizing all of its web assets through online ads and they are sometimes copying or are giving away for free or opening up all other services not in their core but in some other company's core business. They are the most prominent company to play well the open web ideas;

But they are vulnerable too, one such threat is the robads.org ad standards; which wants to standardize how ads are defined and published on the web in a simple manner. If robads.org gets traction, and people start to publish their ads online, Google may face a vulnerability in its core business too.

As long as Google dominates in search, Google will be able to monetize better than anyone else. robads seems interesting though, but will have a long time to get adopted.

This is arrogant statement. It assumes that CEO's vision and leadership is great but just that inside politics make it not so great.

Google's biggest threats are Apple (mobile front), Facebook (social front), Amazon (cloud front), and Microsoft (search front).

EDIT: of course I will be downvoted. But this is my honest opinion I would like to somebody explain me why think this not an arrogant statement.

I'd much rather have an "arrogant" CEO who is aware of how internal processes slow down and spend time thinking about it than someone who don't know or care. Obviously, some companies are better at this than others (as you yourself hinted at in another comment). Page just wants Google to be best at this. Ambitious, perhaps. Arrogant, not so much.

Larry Page is right: internal problems dominate large companies.

Microsoft is more "mature" corporation and they have much more severe internal problems.

That is not true. Why internal problems don't dominate Amazon? Why interal problems don't dominate Oracle (100K+ people)? Google is not so big and old to claim that is the problem. I think Google's problem is lack of leadership and vision.

Why do you think internal problems are not dominant in Amazon and Oracle?

First hand experience (not very recent, but I doubt it changed a lot). For example, Oracle is very customer focused in many teams. I heard many times: "The only person responsible your salary is customer". That really keeps things moving smooth.

I understand problem with Google: all these products and projects are free, so it is really hard to put $$ sign on them. Politics emerges because it is hard to decide when a paying customer is not your main objective.

Economists talk about this under the heading of transaction costs.

That is, if a perfectly free market is the ideal way to allocate resources, how do we wind up with companies? Remember, a company is essentially a little island of command economics in the wider sea of the market.

In the 30s Coase proposed that companies form because it is cheaper to do some things in a command fashion than to pay the "transaction cost" of continuously searching the market for an optimal solution to your problem.

For example, it might be cheaper and easier to hire a programmer than to continuously manage a set of programming contractors working on a dozen different little projects.

The interesting thing is that it's not a fixed relationship. Information technology reduces the cost of both internal and external transactions: thus we get larger megacorps and more entrepreneurs.

> Remember, a company is essentially a little island of command economics in the wider sea of the market.

There's some truth in there, but it's a stretch. In a true command economy, you can't opt out of the command economy without defecting/revolution/violence. In a company, you can quit and take your labor elsewhere. Likewise, suppliers can stop supplying and buyers can stop buying. Not so with the Commissar's Shoe Producing Command Division.

I'm not sure. You might be conflating command economics with totalitarianism. I'm not an economist so I can't be sure.

In terms of historical examples of command economies, yes, they've lacked the ability of labour to walk away. Indeed one of the first things the USSR did was reintroduce a form of serfdom -- workers were bonded to their enterprise and couldn't move without permission.

A good pop-econ/narrative read on the history of Soviet economics is Red Plenty by Francis Spufford.

Calling a company an "island of command economics" is really just a harsh way of calling out the overly bureaucratic nature of many larger organizations, but the idea that a perfectly free market exists now or can ever come into existence is really just a fairy tale. The primary purpose of the notion of a perfectly free market is to make it easier for economists to publish theoretic papers and so politicians have economic issues to demagogue.

It might also help to distinguish between the micro-economic and macro-economic issues raised above. While the two are dependent, they tend to approach problems from opposite ends of the transactional chain. Generally, a company's goal is micro-economic (to maximize profits), while governments are more concerned with macro-economic issues like employment and inflation (via fiscal/monetary policy). That said, IMO, the transaction costs are a symptom of the corporate rot that we see when a company rests too much on its laurels.

Your point about the relationship between technology and company formation is also very well taken... it does seem that we are at a tipping point where technology is having a very pronounced impact on business decisions.

You may have noticed that in my grandparent post I did not posit whether or not a "perfect free market" exists. Indeed the existence of the firm is seen as evidence that it does not, which is how Coase came to think about the origins of the firm in the first place.

I don't think any serious economist has ever said a perfect market exists. But lots of folk sure like to beat that strawman up.

Google's Biggest Threat Is Google failing to innovate. They're still a one-trick pony after all these years.

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