Google All the Way
Surely, it is not just me who thinks Google is getting a pretty firm grip on the average consumer's internet usage. I mean, they have a presence in almost every kind of online communication and they are really starting to compete with big players in other segments, too.
Let's look at the following analogy... In my little segment of the ICT world we tend to focus a lot on Amazon because they made some very smart strategic moves over the past five years or so. Remember when Amazon was just an online book store? Many people probably still think of Amazon as an online shop for books, music, and these days also electronics and just about everything you can think of. Their online retail business is probably earning them quite a bit of money. More importantly, however, Amazon probably worked on their own piece of technology to run their business on, and found out that they could make even more money by making that technology available to a slightly advanced user audience.
Hence the Amazon computing and storage services:
Without going into too much detail, these are public web services that cost virtually nothing and provide computing capacity (virtual computers) and storage space on-demand and on a pay-for-what-you-use basis. Strategically speaking, this proved to be a brilliant move, and although the competition will eventually catch up or discover another niche segment in the same market, for now Amazon are clearly leading the way.
Brilliant Move
The way I see it, Google are making an equally brilliant move in a different segment of the online business. Statistics say that over the past year 90% of online searches were performed using Google; about 5% use Yahoo, and others like Bing and MSN/Live are not even worth mentioning. Are you a Google user? I have not used anything else in years and I can think of nobody who is a great fan of anything else. So Google is master of online searches, but have you noticed that they spent the past couple of years building an entire online application suite around their search engine? Many private email users have Gmail accounts -- why? You can access your mail anytime anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. If you prefer, you can download to a local client on your pc using IMAP, and if you want to migrate your entire business, large or small, google will serve email for your company domain at a fairly reasonable price of about 50 USD per user per year. The package includes Google Calendar as well, so you can manage and share schedules among co-workers and check for updates using your smartphone when you are travelling. So instead of buying server hardware and an Exchange Server Enterprise Edition licence for several thousand dollars, you can spend company capital on other things and buy services from Google.
Whether you are a paying Google customer or a private (i.e. free) account owner, you also get the benefit of using Google Docs to share and collaborate on any standard Office document. Once again, there is no need to connect directly to your company file server to retrieve the latest version of that document you have to send to your customer, and you do not have to wait your turn if someone else has that spreadsheet open that you urgently need to update. If you are online you can get to it. And with an SLA from Google that guarantees you 99.9% availability, why would you want to store your stuff on your own servers? Google offers all categories of internet users the possibility to use their services instead of running them on their own hardware. For private users, it is all free. Corporate users pay a fee in return for personalization and guaranteed uptime but they still save money because they do not have to provision the hardware and software required to run the same services privately.
Business Model
The idea of running web services for a monthly or yearly fee is not exactly brand spanking new. It has been here for several years and the most common example is probably web hosting: you pay a web hosting provider to host and possibly also develop your web site, and you manage the contents through an administration console. If you are an advanced user, you may be able to build your own style sheets etc. and maybe an API is available for you to program your custom code against. This is also what Google does with their Google Apps, which is the global name of all of Google's collaboration and communication applications. What is so good about this model is that you take the internal IT hassle away so you can focus on what matters: your content. In addition, they have expanded their offering and proved their expertise in many different areas: location service Google Maps, RSS feed app Google Reader, instant messenger Google IM, to name but a few.
What is particularly interesting about Google's approach is how they introduce their web services to the public. They start with a beta program that is usually aimed at a select number of professionals and who provide their feedback in exchange for a chance to play with new and cutting edge technology. Until recently, most Google Apps were marked as 'beta'. Years ago Gmail also began as an invitation-only web service. A smart move, because the exclusive nature made Gmail something that seemingly everyone wanted to have. In the second half of 2009 they launched Google Wave; probably their most innovative service yet. Wave is supposed to integrate instant and offline messaging, file sharing/exchange and online collaboration in a forum thread type of interface with a lot of options like private messages, polls, maps, and hopefully a lot more extensions in the near future when developers start sharing their creativity. Watch out for Wave announcements going forward, because this is a very powerful tool that was built from the ground up with today's integrated web experience in mind. If you are interested, have a look at the 80-minute introduction video made by the Google Wave inventors and creators, or at least try to get your hands on a trial account and find out what it could do for you. I got my invite last week after several months and I have to admit it was worth the wait...
What also demonstrates how ambitious Google is, is the integration of the search engine in the excellent Google Chrome browser,which has been praised by experts for its speed. I am a long time Firefox user myself, but after the stability issues with Firefox 3.5 and the very convincing Chrome 4.0 beta release I may start to use Chrome more. It will be interesting to see, though, if Google can match this success with their own lightweight Linux based operating system Chrome OS, which should be available on netbooks and UMPCs some time in 2010. Considering that it builds on the the Android technology we saw appear on several smartphones and PDAs this year, I would be surprised if it were not every bit as convincing.
Google, to me, has established itself as the provider of services for people who live on the internet. Combine your favorite Linux distro with Sun's OpenOffice and a bunch of Google web services and you have everything you need for free. Buy a decent laptop and use the money you would otherwise spend on Windows and Office to get yourself a quality (Android) mobile device. If you live online 24/7, it will give you everything you asked for. But even if you do not, you will not regret it either 