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Ask HN: What's the future of Google?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the future of Google?

#3

Post by ianamartin »

In the short term, I think Google founders as the people buying online ads from them become increasingly aware that the real value of online ads is far far lower than what people are paying at the moment.

As the ad and research industries catch up to the web and figure out real metrics for these things, people will not keep paying the prices that prop up Google's cash cow.

At some point in the next 5-10 years, I think the bottom drops out of that market and Google gets caught flat-footed. Same goes for Facebook, incidentally.

At the same time the ad market is bottoming out for Google, I expect something like Duck-Duck-Go to hit them on the search side of things in a big way.

The result of this 1-2 punch is that 10 years from now, Google is about where Yahoo! was before Marissa Mayer took over, and where it is a hundred years from now depends on what direction they go from there.

The key for both Google and Facebook is when someone cracks the code on doing something useful with all the data they are collecting. To me, this isn't a technology problem; it's a science problem. Classical statistics doesn't do well at this scale. Collect enough data, and you can find evidence for any correlation you might happen to search for. That doesn't mean it's real. We need real scientific advances in the way that we prepare, ingest, test, and interpret data at this scale, and we are literally at the infant stages of imagining how that might work.

If Google hangs on through the hard times ahead, they are well-positioned to lead the way in that scientific advancement. But they will have to get out of the mindset that some new technology innovation can solve this. It can't.

Personally, I think we're 25-30 years away from being able to deal effectively with data at Google's scale. While it's possible that Google could still be around at that time, collecting data that way will no longer be a novelty that only people like Google and Facebook can do. Everyone will have that capability. Mountains of data treasure will be the commodity that processing power is today.

So, yeah, 10 years from now, Google is throwing out press releases that sound like recycled PR material from Yahoo or Microsoft in 2008, and most people are looking at them thinking: "How did that happen?"

That's my 2 cents.

edited for typos.

Re: Ask HN: What's the future of Google?

#4

Post by techdog »

I agree with much of what ianamartin said. Google is unlike most big companies in that it thinks 10 to 20 years out (but pays scant attention to short-term strategies). Their problem as I see it is not to have great products in 10 years but to build a bridge from here-and-now to the 10-year mark. Clearly, their ad model is fading in significance. Ad spends are shifting (rapidly) from classic PPC search ads to timeline ads (on FB, TWTR, Pinterest, and other "timeline providers") and "native" content ads. In the meantime, Google has suffered a lack of focus, spreading itself rather thinly over a large surface area of products and projects that haven't become big moneymakers. Its efforts in social media (Google+) have brought mixed success. With the decline of classic PPC search ads, the SEO value of Google+ has become moot. Google is attempting to compete with Amazon in cloud services but is unlikely to get further than "also-ran" status.

Over the short term, Google will remain profitable, but whether it can build a bridge to a future of driverless cars, etc., is less certain.

$0.02

Re: Ask HN: What's the future of Google?

#8

Post by no_future »

Google confounds me. They are one of the largest tech companies as far as just pure reach, they own the top search engine, email service, and mobile operating system, as well as a host of other properties both hardware and software(and a huge pile of money that they're sitting on), yet still to this day make 99% of their revenue from assaulting people with ads on Youtube and in their search results. They attempted to get into hardware by buying Motorola, but later ended up selling it to Lenovo at a loss. They have the capital and resources to expand into pretty much any field that they so desire(including taking another crack at hardware), so why do they put all their eggs in the advertising basket?

Re: Ask HN: What's the future of Google?

#9

Post by yen223 »

no_future wrote: post #8

Google confounds me. They are one of the largest tech companies as far as just pure reach, they own the top search engine, email service, and mobile operating system, as well as a host of other properties both hardware and software(and a huge pile of money that they're sitting on), yet still to this day make 99% of their revenue from assaulting people with ads on Youtube and in their search results. They attempted to…

It's pretty telling that in the 20+ years that the Internet has gone mainstream, web companies still haven't found a business model that generates as much revenue as advertising - a lesson that old media learned a long time ago. It boils down to the problem that Internet users are conditioned to expect services for free, and advertising appears to be the only way to provide sustainable "free" services.
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