Google Tea Leaves : Not All That Green & Fresh!!

Tristan Louis writes that it increasingly appears that Google is filling up holes in their offering,in an attempt to match its competitors. His assessment of Google’s offering with that of Yahoo, Microsoft & AOL throws interesting results.He finds while Google is the leader in search, apart from Catalog and Usenet search, Google does not offer services offered by others or currently under development. Interestingly, Google does not have any offerings in the Audio (nor a Podcast offering) and Encyclopedia space (although Wikipedia results sometimes pop-up in search results.) This seems to highlight two potential areas where Google will introduce new products: an audio search engine, which will include podcasts, and some type of partnership with Wikipedia to fill the reference space. Google has generally been the first to market with many of the search collections and it works more as a competitive threat to its competitors, forcing them to invest more in their search product and, in the process, improving the quality and breadth of search data for every user on the Internet. This is a good thing but not revolutionary unto its own. Do take time to read Tristan's well developed charts.
While assessing Non-search services & developer services he finds that Google does innovate in some spaces but has largely innovated in order to gain entry in markets that already existed. While google breathes innovation,competitors are generally quick to notice and are catching up & concludes that in the near future Google may come up with offering like:
- Some type of clustered search offering
- A calendar product, which will probably inject new life in that space
- An auction offering, tied with an internal payment system
- A web hosting service that will scale from small entities to large ones and will include Gmail as part of the email offering
- Some type of access service, probably using their WiFi solution

As I wrote recently its time Google clearly explains its vision that it is executing for the next 2-3 years – very important that there should be a plan to grow and sustain the 100+Billion USD marketcap (incidentally bigger than the GDP of some oil producing Asian nations – the likes of Indonesia.) contrarian views about Google’s valuations definitely need a closer examination. I think this issue needs some serious evaluation as I had been pointing out for sometime like here, here about google's ability to sustain its leadership and support the very high marketcap. Google has to come out in the open about its plans for spending the money say building its own Internet,online index,along with monetizing models in more specific terms. Its time that we get to see and know things beyond the likes of generic macro views like that of George Colony, which focusses only on what and not the how.I would like to let's say hear Google's vision of Web 2.0 or even beyond.Like in any other industry the responsibility of pioneers and leaders are lot more than just looking after themselves - they are trendsetters and rolemodels in the industry.