I have studied companies and their lifecycles for years and knowing that Google is in a "late-teen" to "adult" phase of growth, where do you think they will turn to for future growth in later years? There is only so much a company can do with SE advertising and Adwords. They have seemed to think lately that buying up startup tech companies with good ideas can make a lot of money, but other companies are also doing that. Could they actually contemplate buying another competitor like Yahoo and consolidating the market a bit? Just curious on anyone else's thought here since I know that they are under a lot of scrutiny by the readers of this forum.
I think the opening in Google's armor is the fact that they still base their site ranking mainly on the basis of links from internet "real estate owners" instead of throwing the balance more towards the users of their site which is what sites like Delicious do. Yes, Google claims big changes in their algorithm all the time, but serps haven't really changed that much. You still have to wade throw loads of crap to find what you are looking for.
Google buys out smaller companies for the patents they might hold and also the people working for thoes companies. As they have cited continuously that there biggest problem is getting qualified people to work for them. You are also only focusing on one section, google does sell enterprise grade document servers for a pretty penny. Google Checkout makes a percentage for each sale. And theres a few other markets. Pierce
naphets66: I agree with that completely. There is still a lot of crap in teh serps, and I think that is one reason Google could "jump the shark" in a sense. Especially if someone else comes along with a great search engine and a meme which starts appealing to geeks. I could even see another scenario like the Google replacing Yahoo of the past. Pierce: Yes, you are quite correct. Those other markets are definitely important in the overall analysis. Do you think those markets put Google in a jack-of-all-trades type of category? I know Microsoft has somewhat played this role over the years as it moved from a software only company to a software, hardware, services, etc., company. But that was a slow steady growth which was built into a behemoth whereas Google seems to be jumping all over the place snapping folks up and trying to become another Microsoft. I think from a company culture standpoint this strategy could undermine and off balance the whole package since it is akin to building a house of cards. I personally hold the opinion that the rate of change at Google as they buy other companies, integrate them, and move on to the next one may be the Google Achilles heel at some point in the future.