Image soure: wikipedia
Americans love the underdog. Remember when seven years ago Google was a small startup, founded two smart guys from Standford? We has the same warm and fuzzy feelings about Microsoft in the 80s, when Bill Gates was everyone’s favorite geeky software boy wonder. It’s funny how, in typical American fashion, everyone roots for the underdog until it becomes the leader. At that point, the 90s era Microsoft and the current Google found themselves scratching their heads, thinking, “Where did our love go?”
We wouldn’t be so frustrated that Google is storing and analyzing all of our data, if they didn’t continually to offer or buy and integrate consistently superior products and services. Now that Google is the front runner, everyone has placed a bit target on the back of the company everyone seems to love and hate.
As a follower of innovation, I’m particularly interested in Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of Creative destruction, which embodies the notion that innovation, particularly from entrepreneurs, creates products or services that displace market leaders. Creative destruction is powerful idea and an amazing witness in real time. I’ll admit that it’s too often trotted out to defend monopolies, without mentioning that people often are getting screwed while they wait for some upstart to knock them down.
We know that with personalized search, the acquisition of youtube and Feedburner, gmail, and google docs, Google’s privately owned servers hold more of our digital lives each day. When it is too much? This week, while the Economist is asking “Who’s afraid of Google?” Techcruch is touting Cuill (pronounced ‘cool’) as the one to watch.
This startup was created by Anna Patterson and Russell Power, two ex-Google search experts and Tom Costello, who founded of the search engine Xift. Cuill is claiming that their search algorithms and methodology require only 10% of Google’s index costs. Of course, this could all be vaporware, but they have Google’s attention. TechCrunch reports that Google has offered to buy the company, even before the launching of their search engine.
Knowing when a company controls too much power is a very difficult thing to ascertain, until it’s too late. We haven’t been successful at finding the sweet spot where the creative destruction of innovation can occur and flourish without putting the general population at risk. This point occurs at the intersection of innovation, access, and regulation.
Cuill might be the Google search engine killer or it might just be a media darling that dies a quiet death or lingers as an also ran. (There was a time when people thought that Real Networks was posed to challenge Microsoft on the web.) As the speed of innovation increases, what are the criteria and guidelines to know when intervene and level the playing field. Is this something that is even possible to know? If not, what is should be the role of publically funded innovation, as it is getting increasingly rare, as the US government in particular is shifting the responsibility of research and design to the private sector.
see the cover story on google in this week’s economist…and happy birthday mr. c.
Thanks. Link to cover story is in the post, and worth reading. Although I think you need a subscription to access it.
As for “too much influence:” antitrust enforcers used to use the HHI measure of market concentration. That is off the charts in the search engine, recorded music, and other innovation markets. Sadly, current AT “enforcers” now seem far more willing to let one company dominate a field and then sigh and say “oh, it must be a natural monopoly.”