A little over a week ago I asked the question on this blog, What Does Google Really Want from Us? I mainly talked about the competitive stakes in the search market and what Google has done to keep themselves at the top.
Today I’ll take this idea a bit further with a look at:
What Google Might Do
As with its classified venture, any commerce play Google undertakes would be cutting edge, carry low barriers to entry and be based on their core competency: organizing the web. E-commerce enablement, website hosting and related development services could come out of their search business, but all seem a bit too pedestrian at this point. They’re low-impact and don’t really jive with their mission statement (assuming you believe it). Even the rumored acquisition of AOL is more in support of an ad-revenue model than an attempt to collect directly from consumers.
So with that preface in mind, here are just a few ideas for the ways Google might develop in the near future:
Video
Broadcast and video distribution is changing drastically, as the gatekeepers to consumption are no longer the producers of the content, let alone their prior distribution partners. ABC’s locked up distribution for $1.99 commercial-free downloads with iTunes and NBC has just jumped aboard. CBS will offer commercial-free programming for $1.99 through Comcast’s video-on-demand service while in addition to the iTunes platform, NBC will offer the same deal through DirectTV. These are of course the biggest content players, and by association, distributors of what’s possibly the best-protected media assets around.
Clearly Google can buy out a company like iFilm, as MTV did, or attempt to launch a music download service like MSN and AOL. But Google hasn’t indicated they intend to build-out a portal for content, entertainment, etc. Whether you buy into their mission statement or not, Google’s been very consistent in developing products central to search so far.
For the quickest path between Google and a la carte video downloads, just consider all the unprotected viral video clips they index and the means by which they index them. Google has a vested interest in leading a move to standardize meta-data and tagging conventions for multimedia files, that much is clear. Once they do standardize such conventions for independently produced assets, a structured marketplace is only one step away.
As for why video over music, video simply represents a better proof-of-concept: consider all those viral video clips that race around the Internet like wildfire. Now consider the fact that they’re independent, unprotected, non-trademarked files. They can be just as viable a product as professionally produced content, they carry greater mainstream appeal than any piece of music could, and catch on quicker than any independently produced multimedia around.
P2P
What’s held back the peer-to-peer business model is licensing. Until the entertainment industries find better ways to copyright their digital assets, and work with the networks to not just abide them but collect appropriate fees, this most efficient method of distribution won’t become a viable method of distribution.
Of all the possible developments to come in the field of intellectual protection, Google probably has little responsibility to participate, let alone lead the way. But if the protectors approach the challenge from perspective of the content and not the purveyor (as most ISP-directed lawsuits have concluded), and take it upon themselves to help the search engines distinguish copyrighted materials from unprotected and public domain contents, then Google clearly becomes the biggest purveyor of this content.
We might not think of it as a P2P network, but as long as individuals are hosting this content from personal, decentralized computers, a P2P is exactly what Google will be. Right now it appears that Google would have to network their Google Desktop product for this to happen (which they could do, in some limited capacity).
On the other hand, the emerging Microsoft Live product suggests such a future from personal computers and intranets to extranets and globally networked contents. Between Google’s search functionality and their Paypal-like Google Purchase or Google Wallet, this could bring micro-payments into the US mainstream.
Publishing
Back to that Google Print claim, they could sell stand-alone content like Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade, but with their current trademark policies and lack of infrastructure to support such a move, it seems unlikely. Drawing from the idea above, they could conceivably launch a product like Amazon Shorts, where the ecommerce giant sells brief, original fiction and nonfiction for 49 cents apiece. The Amazon Shorts concept requires substantially less infrastructure than the Amazon Pages scenario, as the contents would be independent and un-trademarked. Without the requirement for large-scale payments, audits and APIs into the publishing industry, all Google would need is a basic accreditation service for micro-payments and top-line reporting… not unlike their current interface with AdSense publishers.
More far-fetched (but possible), is the idea that Google could build out a publishing gateway for archived materials. Right now the web hosts a wealth of publishing content free for the first week or so, then much of this content is commonly relegated to a gated archive like The New York Times TimesSelect.
Publishers are starting to build out this model, but users will hardly pay a noteworthy monthly fee for access to download 100 gated articles. Impulse shoppers have shown a reluctance to pre-pay for online services, especially a high-volume of digital assets that could take days, months or years for them to claim.
Surely pre-paying for a wider assortment of content, to be redeemed for news and entertainment articles, interviews, multimedia modules or even recipes would seem more attractive to an online audience. For years I’ve wondered why the publishing industry doesn’t have a graduated distribution and pricing model like the movie industry (theater, airplane, hotel room, pay-per-view, cable, broadcast) or the music industry (Super-Savers anyone?), maybe the search wars will redefine journalism and create value for their contents long after their initial timeliness fades.
Office Suite Services
On the note of a creating a publishing gateway for purchasing archived contents, the idea could turn a bit inwards in the form of a basic content platform worked into Google Desktop. Browsers have come to feed directly into Adobe’s standard-markup PDF reader for such documents, often open up Word or Excel within the frameset, and can readily display multimedia contents through similar plug-ins and attachments.
While Google has no need to get into the browser game, there is a natural evolution to evolve Google desktop software to compile documents and file extensions into one common interface for editing?
Corporate Products
Google will without a doubt become a bigger player in the desktop software market, though a move to sell licensed personal software could carry potential conflicts with their brand positioning and standing as a public utility for a free, democratic World Wide Web.
Of course B2B applications already exist and will scale quickly in the next few years within vicinity of informational technologies and intranet applications. Google already offers a handful of enterprise solutions including a $3,000 search server called Google Mini for public websites and intranets, primarily directed at small to mid-size businesses. For $30K the Google Search Appliance indexes all forms of content on your intranet and websites. This last product adds new enterprise-level security, configuration and deployment controls, as well as the ability to search the full text of IBM Lotus Notes messages. Will Google Desktop morph into an intranet and networking product?
Additionally, consumers are free to build off their core search products, as Google’s encouraged the creation of a slew of mash-ups. Currently Google provides access to the underlying code, so programmers can draw upon that code and feed in information from other applications. With the Linux revolution Google will have to keep their products open and available for this type of free collaboration, but as Google’s products become more comprehensive and interactive with private warehouses of information, there will likely be a move to charge not licensing fees but micro-charges for each API touch-point. The API alone is Google’s way to claim costs for bandwidth, but in reality create a sizable profit-center for basic (and necessary) access.
Back to the notion of a common interface for media, Microsoft has announced plans to develop a news video-distribution network for The Associated Press and share the advertising revenue generated by the newspapers and broadcasters that use the footage.
It’s quite possible that Google develops a Bloomberg-like media platform that provides access to licensed business contents and research systems (be that Reuters news, Jupiter research or Donovan Data Systems media intelligence or Gallup polling data). The product would be a natural evolution of Google’s desired to crawl the invisible web and harness shallow consumer-created web contents as well as more proprietary, higher-level contents created for industry.
The End (Finally)
As for suggestions to what’s to come, these are purely speculative and I’m far from the most qualified member of this community to make them. Everybody has thoughts on Google’s future, whether you see them as a competitor of search players like Yahoo, publishers like the New York Times, or an enterprise software giant like Microsoft.
We at SearchViews would love to hear some of your ideas for where Google’s going and which utilities present the lowest barriers to entry with the most obvious ties to their business of today. Feel free to comment below or drop us a line.
Randy Schwartz is Director of Strategic Development at Reprise Media.
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