Google – our gentle giant?
Yesterday, kortina and I attended hack-a-thon here in nyc. It was a good day all-in-all. The app engine is really nice. In the space of 10am to 6pm we were able to concept, develop and deploy a fully functional app, tinydb.org (not to mention do a little presentation on it).
Being in the google offices, it got me thinking about them again. They own everything – all our info is indexed on their servers, most all of our online advertising goes through them now at one point or another, they are recruiting all the best and brightest and continually announcing placements for what seem ludicrous additions. They are one of the best known and most liked brands and are consistently listed as the top place to work.
Now with app engine, their partnership with salesforce.com to take the CRM/enterprise market not to mention all their other amazing apps, they are Wal-Mart of the internet world. They are the nerdy middle school kid who grew up to be the high school football star. They have it all.
So who are they? Are they the Wal-Mart model, where their momentum is turned them into what many industry people describe as a “runaway semi-truck” which will dominate all in its path without obligation to anything but shareholders?*
Or are they our gentle giant? I sure hope so.
A case in point. We had lunch the other day with a friend of our that is at one of the biggest media buyers in new york and her comment about the doubleClick deal finally going through is that 80% of the ads they serve online now go through some part of the google network at some point either for serving or reporting. Should we be scared or be thankful that some intelligence is finally coming to rich media advertising.
I had a chance to work with google way back in 2003 when google was going at the local listing with their now defunct “phone:” function. My little job was to help an investment bank that owned a bunch of phone books throughout Europe integrate with google results. We started with the dutch phone book (it’s still up at http://www.detelefoongids.nl/). Google (or at least google in Europe) didn’t know their head from their @ss then. I even went so far as to call up the VP of European operations and give him a piece of my mind (probably not the best idea since if I had taken a different tone and suggest I could help things might be very different).
But back to my point. They are a great company. They lived up to the hype. They were able to get past the whirlwind of explosive growth an organize the creative chaos that is their organization into something that continues to amaze all of us in the internet space.
So what now. From my perspective as a technologist who get most of his income making rich media apps, google is benevolent (at least for now). With google app engine and some decent api for google data, many of us see them as more of a patron who are giving us the tools to deploy application without having to concern ourselves with many details. I just did a job for a major airline. Had the app engine been primetime it would have cut our workload in half. We also do tons of little widget apps where a simple deployment and costing structure that can basically infinitely scale if the campaign goes “viral” would save me from those dreaded midnight call for some account executive that thinks internet is powered by gnomes (maybe it is).
*not my analogy – it’s from an interview I some wal-mart documentary that I cant remember the reference to.
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