Saturday, September 20, 2008

Google's strategy - connecting the dots - II

Continuing from my previous post, here I would delve upon, how these products/features impact Google and provide it an upper hand.
Given that, it would improve its search quality, an obvious result would be increased number of advertisers. But more importantly, it gives them more media to explore. They can now provide context-sensitive ads over video and audio. Think of it, if some of the channels on youtube have advertisements, related to any product which may be spoken about in the video, users may not be that bugged at all. Anyways a similar experiment of providing video ads, on text web search is running currently. Video ads surely mean, much higher revenues as compared to the text ads that it currently features. It has also started extending its Ad platform to TV, by partnering with NBC among others, extending the media that it can earn revenues from.

One of the highly awaited developments is in the desktop space, about Google's answer to Microsoft Office. It started off with an online version, and with Google Gears, it had made it available offline too. Now, there is a thin difference between keeping a document on my desktop and making it available over any other desktop. That too, without using any space over my disk. It will continuously be looking at exploiting the cloud computing space, with other products too. What does Chrome bring in? I believe, that it is more of a desktop environment or the first step towards an office suite or even an OS rather than a browser. Bold statement?Yes, I too feel so. But, then what it is trying to do, is letting the users get used to the environment where there is nothing called online or offline. When it asks you to make an application shortcut, it makes you feel that Google Docs is an application. With Google Gears visible in the settings, the next obvious feature is to allow you, to edit it on your local machine, if you are offline. If online, publish it onto the cloud (though this feature is still available with Gears, I believe, it would extend it across products and applications over the web, in some form). The absense of all the toolbars and menubars from those windows, is exactly to make you feel so. You should never feel that you are in a browser. And with its own V8 scripting, it is giving itself that flexibility to use this prototype for future moves. There was a time when analysts were speculating a network OS from Google. With its focus on cloud computing, and all its products inching towards that, I don't feel it is an impossibility. (And, do not believe when Google says, we don't want to do it. They said the same for a browser)

Disclaimer : Though many of you may be aware of these features and its consequences, it was meant to give a small insight into the bigger picture - "connecting the dots" as I call it. Also, many of these are personal inferences, and may not be an 'expert' view of the days to come :). Do let me know of any other products/service that you feel perfectly fits into its strategy and I missed it here.

PS: As an aside, check out how Google is desperately trying to increase usage of its App platform, through this contest :)

PPS: Why did this no-nonsense post seriosly pop up? 2 reasons - a)To commemorate 10 years of Google b)To remain in-line with my description in 'about me' (look rightwards), which has been reminded by some of my readers (and who, I assume, would appreciate the same in the comments section ;) )

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Duly appreciated! Quite an interesting read. I am a bit concerned about the video ads you talked about. Is that really true? I really like the unobtrusive text ads from Google.

Seeker of Truth said...

Speaking of the 'About Me' , here is a limerick celebrating the return to earnestness from levity...

Since whatever they say is trusted in earnest,
Any fooling by the wise draws a shocked protest !
Every wisecrack from the wise,
Has the element of surprise...
Their very solemnness sets the stage for their jest!

Seshadri said...

@deepan, its just my take on it. they havent announced anything. but then, if it is AFTER the end of video, then it wouldnt be that obtrusive, and atleast 50% of the ppl wud watch it.

@arvind, as i wud hav expected the comment to have been. have to read it twice over to get its meaning (and also refer to the dictionary)

Unknown said...

I get it now. I had misunderstood earlier. I thought video ads meant ads in the form of video. Yes, context sensitive ads obtained by analyzing video have a lot of potential.

Seshadri said...

@deepan, video ads still mean ads in the form of video, just that they would play at the end of ur video, so making it rather unobtrusive