Barry Hand

Got some time to spare? stick on a pot of cof­fee and have a browse through Google’s end of year report filed with the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion.

In a month where Google launched Buzz, this in par­tic­u­lar caught my atten­tion (page 15)

Com­pe­ti­tion

Our busi­ness is char­ac­ter­ized by rapid change and con­verg­ing, as well as new and dis­rup­tive, tech­nolo­gies. We face for­mi­da­ble com­pe­ti­tion in every aspect of our busi­ness, par­tic­u­larly from com­pa­nies that seek to con­nect peo­ple with infor­ma­tion on the web and pro­vide them with rel­e­vant adver­tis­ing. We face com­pe­ti­tion from:

• Tra­di­tional search engines, such as Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corporation’s Bing.

• Ver­ti­cal search engines and e-commerce sites, such as WebMD (for health queries), Kayak (travel queries), Mon​ster​.com (job queries), and Ama​zon​.com and eBay (com­merce). We com­pete with these sites because they, like us, are try­ing to attract users to their web sites to search for prod­uct or ser­vice infor­ma­tion, and some users will nav­i­gate directly to those sites rather than go through Google.

• Social net­works, such as Face­book, Yelp, or Twit­ter. Some users are rely­ing more on social net­works for prod­uct or ser­vice refer­rals, rather than seek­ing infor­ma­tion through tra­di­tional search engines.

• Other forms of adver­tis­ing. We com­pete against tra­di­tional forms of adver­tis­ing — such as tele­vi­sion, radio, news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, bill­boards, and yel­low pages — for ad dollars.

• Mobile appli­ca­tions. As the mobile appli­ca­tion ecosys­tem devel­ops fur­ther, users are increas­ingly access­ing e-commerce and other sites through those com­pa­nies’ stand-alone mobile appli­ca­tions, instead of through search engines.

• Providers of online prod­ucts and ser­vices. We also pro­vide a num­ber of online prod­ucts and ser­vices, includ­ing Gmail, YouTube, and Google Docs, that com­pete directly with new and estab­lished com­pa­nies that offer com­mu­ni­ca­tion, infor­ma­tion, and enter­tain­ment ser­vices inte­grated into their prod­ucts or media properties.

We com­pete to attract and retain users of our search and com­mu­ni­ca­tion prod­ucts and ser­vices. Most of the prod­ucts and ser­vices we offer to users are free, so we do not com­pete on price. Instead, we com­pete in this area on the basis of the rel­e­vance and use­ful­ness of our search results and the fea­tures, avail­abil­ity, and ease of use of our prod­ucts and services.

Nei­ther our users nor our adver­tis­ers are locked in to Google. For users, other search engines are lit­er­ally one click away, and there are no costs to switch­ing search engines. Our adver­tis­ers typ­i­cally adver­tise in mul­ti­ple places, both online and offline. We com­pete to attract and retain con­tent providers (Google Net­work mem­bers, as well as other con­tent providers for whom we dis­trib­ute or license con­tent) pri­mar­ily based on the size and qual­ity of our adver­tiser base, our abil­ity to help these part­ners gen­er­ate rev­enues from adver­tis­ing, and the terms of the agreements.

Kayak​.com cited above, are a rel­a­tively small com­pany with less than 100 employee’s. I’m not sure what they’ll be think­ing named as a com­peti­tor. Scared? or Flat­tered? or both. Don’t be sur­prised to see Google buy them at some stage this year.

This may go some way to explain Google Buzz, which has been thrust upon us like a Simon Cow­ell pop act. The thing about twit­ter & face­book as well as other great web­sites is that as part of the com­mu­nity you watch it grow and have a sense of belong­ing. Buzz cer­tainly does not have that feel and in my opin­ion is a clear sign that Google is los­ing it’s stran­gle­hold on the web (or is at least concerned).

Sim­ply put, Google want peo­ple using their ser­vices for what­ever func­tion they need the inter­net for in order to sell adver­tis­ing off, it’s not com­pli­cated but it’s sure to get very inter­est­ing this year.