Google’s future and how it shapes ours
As Google celebrates its 10th birthday, The Times talked with Internet experts about what the company should do over the next decade. Condensed interviews follow. For the full text visit latimes.com/technology.
Michael Arrington
Editor and founder of
TechCrunch
Google continues to fight a multifront war. They dominate search and search marketing, which is where most online advertising dollars are spent today. That gives them a huge war chest to explore other areas for both defensive and offensive purposes -- Google Docs and Google Apps to try to disrupt Microsoft Office revenue and further erode the need for Windows, for example.
In search, Google needs to continue to dominate text but also explore rich-media search. Today, no one can actually search inside of a picture, video or sound file to see what’s in there.
Finally, social networking is the new search. Everyone’s doing it but no one can monetize it effectively yet.
Kevin Bankston
Senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation
In the next decade, Google will continue to be the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of digital free speech and privacy. On the one hand, Google’s innovative tools for finding and publishing online content have been and will continue to be a boon to the Internet’s billions of users, fostering free speech and open access to information on an unprecedented scale. On the other hand, Google will also continue to be the primary innovator when it comes to finding more powerful and invasive ways of tracking and monetizing Internet users’ private online activities.
Google’s credo is “Don’t be evil,” yet it’s building the biggest horde of sensitive Internet usage data this side of the National Security Agency. In the next decade, Google needs to prove that its commitment to privacy is more than just talk, not only in the design of its products but in its lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C.
Google is the undisputed 800-pound gorilla of the Internet tech sector, and it should start throwing that weight around on Capitol Hill by demanding on behalf of its users an update to this country’s woefully out-of-date electronic privacy laws.
John Battelle
Founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing and author of “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture”
Google is a company in the midst of a pretty significant identity crisis, but it probably doesn’t know that yet. When you are at the point of having so much cash flow and so much success, and you have an employee culture based on being the smartest, best-treated, most important people in the world, you tend to think you can do just about anything. That is a wonderful thing. But if you end up trying to do everything, you can end up forgetting who you are.
Shifts in how culture interacts with technology regularly surprise dominant, near-monopolistic companies. We saw it with IBM and mainframes, who, despite knowing it was coming, lost the interface to Microsoft and Windows. And we saw it again with Windows, which is losing the interface to the Web, search and Google. It remains to be seen if Google will be surprised by a shift from search to something else.
Max Levchin
Founder and chief executive of Slide, chairman of Yelp
The most amazing thing about Google to me is the huge number of small -- and not so small -- online businesses that depend on Google entirely, not just for their customer reach but even their brand. This power hints at future directions for Google: a search engine that knows what I need before I know it, a discovery system that can introduce me to new concepts, a sort of command-line interface to the Web.
The most important thing Google management will have to do over the next decade is figure out how to keep the spirit of entrepreneurial technical and business innovation alive and well within the rapidly scaling company. Fantastic perks like food and massages will only cut it so far.
Marissa Mayer
Vice president of search products and user experience at Google
I think there will be a continued focus on innovation, particularly in search. Search is an unsolved problem. We have a good 90 to 95% of the solution, but there is a lot to go. How do we monetize new forms of content as they come online such as video, maps and books? How do we help content providers transition their businesses online and build healthy businesses?
Ultimately, I think we will focus on what serves users and Google best: making the Web better and making it easier to use the Web.
Mike Sheldon
President of Deutsch LA
Google will continue to receive as much money as they can from advertising, which is 99% of their business. Their $4.2 billion in profits are about people paying to get the top results on their search engine. They will continue to maximize that and try to get a bigger piece of the pie.
I also see them expanding from owning search to owning content. Look for Google to have a bread-crumb trail that leads all the way into social networking via Orkut, and information via Knol, and even browsing via iGoogle and the new browser called Chrome.
They are also entrepreneurial in their bones. They spent $2.1 billion on research last year. That’s quite an R&D; department. They will be inventing over the next 10 years. Google Maps changed the way we view the world. Look for more inventions from them, particularly in the field of interface design and how people experience information.
As for what they should do, they should still grow organically. Build it, don’t buy it. You can ruin the spirit of a company, the way that Microsoft did, by being the guy who buys everybody else.
Danny Sullivan
Editor in chief of SearchEngineLand.com
Google has been saying their business is search, ads and apps for about two years now, and I expect they’ll continue to grow in all those areas. In search, they’re continuing to outdistance the competition, which is in large disarray. This only leaves Google to get stronger in the years to come.
In advertising, I don’t think all their offline attempts will be successful, but I do expect they’ll grow their advertising business.
As an overall search company, Google can’t really be beat from a competitive standpoint. Microsoft is struggling, and it has huge resources to toss into the fight. Everyone else will have an even more difficult time.
What’s more likely to slow Google down is on the legal front. I think that as they get bigger, pressure will come on the government to see if there are some existing or new laws that should be written to curb the company’s dominance.
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia who is writing a book called “The Googlization of Everything”
As we come to terms with just how important Google is in our lives, we are starting to raise some pretty strong questions about how Google handles our personal information, how long it’s stored, what role our searches play in their advertising business and so forth. Google is still a long ways from fully explaining those relationships and those policies. But the company seems to have taken that charge seriously.
It seems destined to become a monopoly in North America and Europe, which is going to raise all sorts of questions about the power of this company not only to govern advertising, privacy and data collection issues but also simply in terms of what we are going to think is important in the future. Google dictates what’s important on the Web right now. It has a profound amount of power.
I don’t think we have seen any evidence that Google abuses its power, but we would make a mistake if we think that Google is simply a neutral lens to the world.
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