Before I write a post that many will consider blasphemy, let me state that I LOVE GOOGLE. I really love the company and I think their products rock. I love the company so much that for a final paper for one of my classes this semester a friend and I decided to write a paper on how Google was "out innovating" Microsoft. We wanted to explore Google's model for innovation and compare it to Microsoft's to see if how the firms structured themselves resulted in the perceived innovation gap. What our research showed was that the two companies were incredibly similar in both their innovation models and approaches to the market.
What prompted this post you may ask? Well recently Wired posted their Wired Top 40... which are supposed to be the "masters of innovation, technology, and strategic vision." Does the following profile of Google make you believe they should be #1 on this list:
Search - Google was roughly the 41st search engine to funded and enter the market. Companies such as Yahoo!, Altavista, and Lycos helped to pioneer this market.
Contextual Advertising - ~95% of Google's revenue is generated from advertisements the company serves next to either search results or news stories. This market was started by a company called Overature which was bought by Google competitor Yahoo!
Orkut - Social networking sites had been in existence for over 5 years before Google entered the market. The recent explosion in popularity of Friendster has prompted numerous "me too" services, including Google's Orkut.
Froogle - Froogle is Google's entry into consumer ecommerce. The site takes a search query and returns products that are available for purchase on the internet. Companies such as Shopping.com have provided cross site ecommerce searching capabilities for years before Google.
Google Toolbar - A "toolbar" is a small application that integrates into a web browser that allows users to more easily accomplish some of the basic tasks they perform on the internet, such as search. Google released its toolbar well after the market had been established by players such as Yahoo!
Gmail - Google's most recent product launch has been Gmail, a free web based email offering. The market for free internet mail was well established by companies such as Hotmail back in the 1990s.
I hate to say it, but Google's real only market innovation came from their search algorithm that has since been essentially replicated by other firms. Based on rumors and reports it appears that their best innovation is a technical one, and that is their ability to build a massive distributed computing network based on cheap hardware.
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