

Google’s Six-Front War - tilt
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/03/google-six-front-war/

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BvS
As I commented on Techcrunch I see it quite different. The only place Google
is attacked is search. That’s going on for years and so far neither Bing nor
anyone else has made any real progress. Also the whole idea that „people
moving slowly from search to discovery” is so far only speculation and I don’t
buy it. Besides being quite cumbersome to ask my friends there are many areas
where I just don’t “trust” them. For example IMDB is much better in predicting
if I will like a certain movie than anyone of my friends is (or even all of
them combined).

On all other fronts Google is not attacked but is attacking. They started from
zero in pretty much all the fields you are mentioning a couple of years ago
and have recently made some impressive gains (especially Android and Chrome).
So it’s not Google who is facing challenging test but Microsoft (Office,
Windows, IE, WP7… ), Apple (Iphone, OSX), Facebook/Tumblr/Quora and
Yelp/Groupon. Google could afford to lose all these battles but search, some
of the other players can’t…

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fraserharris
Agreed. The more interesting question is: how will the others respond?

I see Google's attacks (especially +) as a big win for Microsoft. Only
determined competition could cause the other players to look for partnerships
with them. Ie: Nokia in mobile, Facebook in social (Skype just the beginning).
Google is making Microsoft relevent again.

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Daniel14
I think that's going to play an ever greater role in Google's expanding plans.
They're pissing a lot of established companies off by competing with free, and
mostly, quite simply better products. This is great for consumers because it
kicks competition up a notch - but it could lead to the other companies, now
having a common enemy, to partner up against Google. We recently saw this in
the Nortel case.. FB comments include Yahoo, Bing includes Facebook, Nokia
includes WP7, the list goes on and on. Lots of turkeys do make an eagle - Even
if Google alone is better than all the other players in the market, as long as
they're alone they'll quickly face pretty serious resistance.

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dstein
If you want to use a war analogy, Google isn't really fighting a 6 front war
at all. They're sitting comfortably in their search advertising castle, and
playing guerrilla warfare everywhere else.

Google is attacking Apple/Facebook/Microsoft with free products, and is
betting their entire company that they will win by attrition, or that their
search revenue will continue to fund their efforts.

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eddieplan9
> They're sitting comfortably in their search advertising castle, and playing
> guerrilla warfare everywhere else.

Don't ever think Google is playing guerrilla warfare just to poke fun at the
other guys while sitting on a pile of cash. The reason Google is attacking
these companies is simple: they have become clear threats to Google's core
business - not search, but targeted advertising on the web. Apple's race to
dominance to the mobile space with its walled-garden approach and app- and
vertical-search-based model were threatening the whole open, web-based and
ads-driven model; Microsoft's stronghold on browser market with an ancient
browser was holding the web hostage and killing the potential of web as a
service serving platform; Facebook keeps valuable information that is not
accessible to Google bot and may even be able to develop the next big thing to
replace search, not to mention that it is sucking the best talent; and it has
been very clear that local advertising is where the future growth of targeted
advertising will be from.

Google is being offensive and aggressive, and they are not comfortable about
it when their core business - not search but serving ads - is being
threatened.

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DrCatbox
Well said, a very good analysis.

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vijayr
Not directly related to the topic but.. does anyone else find this "war",
"peace" etc used in a blog post, to discuss competition in the business world,
overly dramatic and annoying?

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h34t
Indeed. The press seems intent on framing any attempt to create a great
product as an effort to make war against whoever is currently in the space.

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c2
There is a great many lines of text written about tech giants like Google and
Microsoft, but at the end of the day the reality is more simple then
interesting. I remember Wired ran a similarly article about Microsoft some
years ago (Linux, Gooogle, Firefox, etc. - war on all fronts).

At the end of the day, Google gets most of it's money from advertising,
Microsoft from Office/Windows lock-in, Amazon from e-commerce, etc.

The one company that really turned it's self on it's own head was Apple, but I
don't see any of the above companies (needing to) do anything so radical any
time soon.

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cageface
_While Android may have more installs, they don’t have the developer community
to build killer apps because the Android marketplace (both for hardware and
firmware) is highly fragmented, whereas iOS is about symphonic convergence._

This seems overly reductive. First, the Android marketplace is quickly
catching up with Apple's, at least in terms of number of apps. Second, it's
not clear at all that fragmentation is the reason it's taken this long to do
so.

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mooism2
No mention of advertising?

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notatoad
indeed. this whole article seems fairly naive.

if you want to stick with the article's war analogy, google isn't fighting a
six-front war. they're fighting a single-front war (advertising) with six
weapons. if all six weapons work exactly as they're supposed to, google will
be sitting pretty. if even five of the six turn out to be failures, google
still wins.

