One reason why Rupert Murdoch is who he is, is because he has been blessed with this ability to cut through the crap, and get straight to the point. In an article in Wall Street Journal (sub required), he talks about his interest in AOL, and why others are jostling to get a piece of the action.
“Microsoft, who’d clearly like to damage Google, would like to get that search switched to Microsoft search, which has very little critical mass. Google heard about it and thought they better defend their turf, and now other people are sniffing around it, Comcast, Yahoo and so on … Google is as much an advertising machine as a technology company, and they’re very brilliant.”
So there it is folks – Google’s game plan. No need for coherence as long as you can attach advertising to it. Or as I like to say, a company that makes profits one page-view at a time.
Google is always rumored to be in on big deals but never comes out the “winner”. Since big deals seem counter to Google’s DNA, is it more likely just fishing, driving up the price, winning by losing?
GOOG for some reason cannot work with other big companies, they are equally “hated” by their partners and competitors. If they need organic growth, they are probably going to hit a wall pretty soon.
Om – can you please do a write up on the partnerships google has and the revenue they have been hitting up with them. They have been poor partners and even poorer in ackowledging the role of their partners. One more thing they have been pretty good at – is shunning the publicity on all the lawsuits hitting them – if any!!! 😉
Good for Google. Partnerships invariably just get in the way.
pwb >> business is all about partnering >>> GOOG has been good at taking from the open source and the “community projects”, but hasn’t really been good at giving back, i need more proof of their goodness. They provide advertising based services that are free..but every business has a limit (for mathematicians – google’s limits do not extend to infinity).