Dallas Business and Marketing Blog

Now before you flay me, before you explain how they have purchased huge social sites (YouTube springs to mind) understand this is not a white paper, not an industry brief, no it is simply an speculative opinion. My first speculation is that I am correct about where social media is going and my second speculation is that Google’s staff is smarter then I am and can predict even more. When I put those two speculations together it forms an very interesting view of the future.

Here is my theory in a nut shell. Search Engine Journal just reported that Google now controls 69% of online advertising. When any company gets to such a dominant position it is not always the champaign and happy times one would expect. Wall Street is a picky mistress and wants growth all the time, every time and at the expense of all other things. Growing when you own a market can be difficult at least growing any faster then the market itself and when a slump hits, even a tiny one you have it real hard.

Again not saying Google won’t continue to make billions, it is the growth of those billions that is getting harder to create.

Now further we must simply accept that Google has never built anything that has really been successful from the ground up other then their search engine. Everything else you can name that they have really succeeded with has been developed by others. The list is long,

• Blogger
• YouTube
• Google Docs
• adSense
• adWords (yep that too)
• Double Click
• And it goes on

Now the problem for Google and their growth long term is that, unlike search, social media is both easier to build platforms for and easier to innovate with. Social Networking is in its’ infancy right now it won’t just be more clone sites in the future exploiting niches (though there will be many of those - successful and flops). No, social platforms will get cooler, more specialized and honestly evolve to change the way people communicate, find jobs, gain education, earn incomes and much more.

One could state that this has already happened. I mean you can get a 100K job at The Ladders, talk to Japan for Free on Skype, find a date on MySpace and get referrals for your next big deal at LinkedIn. All while running a million dollar company from a small home office. Today is a lot different then say 1998 or to really make a point, say 1988.

What this should mean to Google though is growth of market share for the next 10 and 20 years is going to be hard fought. If we are using the web (which was little more then BBSs in 1990 accessed on 14.4 modems) to do these things today, what will tomorrow bring? My guess is some of the innovations we will see in the next 24 months have not even reached a “thought form” stage yet. I bet Google knows this too in fact I am sure they know far more then I do about it.

Now while Google can buy up companies and hire bright minds with something like social media it is going to be driven entrepreneurs coupled with smart programmers and marketers that change the landscape over the next two decades. While most web marketers are not thinking in decades yet, Google must be. As a darling of Wall Street they have to think about this quarter, this fiscal year and their long term plans as well.

I see a future with hundreds of highly successful social networking applications and many versions and niche specific applications of each. Billions of people interacting via hundreds of applications a genie that can never go back into the bottle. Unlike search where there could be a clear winner, social media is to user specific to be funneled down to a “Big Four” which everyone knows is honestly a “Big One”.

So does this scare Google? In my opinion it should. I am not saying that is should make them fear the end of an empire but perhaps the end of an ever expanding empire. In short what I am saying is the social media empire is beginning a growth curve that Google can’t either buy or innovate their way ahead of. Bold statement? I really don’t think it is, it is just my faith in the thousands of innovators out there that are building the future of the Internet.

In conclusion I would like to do one more bit of speculation in a manner anyone looking to the future should do.  Let us look into the past.  If you had to pick the “Google Analog” for say the period of 1980 - 2000, who would it be?  During those two decades who was the “800 Pound Gorilla” of Technology, the Stock everyone had to own and  company that simply could not be beaten?  While you may disagree, the numbers would prove it was Microsoft.

So is Microsoft in danger of Chapter 7 anytime soon?  Will founder Bill Gates be forced to give up his jet or private island retreats?   Of course not!  Yet what kind of growth does Microsoft have today, compared to Google?  How many bright minds want to work there as a “dream job” today?  How often are they now publicly lauded for innovation, creation and changing the way the world does business?  For younger marketers it may be hard to remember but Microsoft was “The Company” just a decade ago.

Then came the browser and even though Microsoft still controls most browsers (for now) it is Google that turned the Browser into a vehicle for a multi billion dollar empire.  When we look at Microsoft today, do we see the Google of 2018?  Now I doubt we can draw an exact analogy, however as anyone who has ever read a mutual fund prospectus can tell you, “while past performance is no guarantee of future results, history has shown it to be a strong indicator”.

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