Technologizer

If Not Google, Who?
By virtually any definition, Google is the most important company on the Web. Which brings up an obvious question: If there’d never been a Google, who would have been the most important Web company?

Microsoft? There’s no question that Google’s success gives Microsoft fits and has left it trying to turn itself into Google. Or that back in the mid-1990s, Bill Gates and company envisioned themselves as being more important on the Web than they turned out to be. But if you take Google out of the equation, I don’t see a scenario in which Microsoft turned out to be as powerful online as it’s been on the desktop; it was already failing to be so even before Google came along.

AOL? Nah–it’s too obvious that its success was built on dial-up and it failed to be as relevant in the broadband era. That would have happened with or without Google.

Comcast or AT&T? God, I hope not!

Yahoo? Maybe! For all the company’s much-publicized challenges as a business, it’s still huge and moneymaking and used by almost everybody. Google’s dominance forced Yahoo into a second-fiddle role, but if you simply imagine the Web as it is in 2008 except without Google, you might come to the conclusion that Yahoo was its most important company.

Somebody else? What-if questions are by definition unanswerable, and the more you depart from reality as it is, the more unanswerable they become. If Brin and Page hadn’t built Google, somebody else might have built something similar that would have become the dominant search engine–and maybe even the most important company on the Web. But simply building a search engine similar to Google wouldn’t have led to everything that’s Google circa 2008.

Final Thoughts
Thinking about everything that Google does, the company really does boil down into a few simple items that make it what it is. Namely:

–it built a splendid product that came to dominate one of the most important tasks on the Internet;

–it does a remarkable job of leveraging that success to make boatloads of money;

–it has extended the idea of search in a zillion directions–not always successfully, but often so;

–it’s fairly frequently had brainstorms that other companies would have rejected, such as giving away a gigabyte of space for e-mail;

–it’s almost always focused its energies on building simple interfaces that people like, then monetizing them after the fact;

–it’s used some of its bushels of money to buy many other innovative companies, such as KeyHole and YouTube and–in some cases, at least–taken their ideas further than they could have on their own;

–it’s used other bushels of money to engage in wildly ambitious projects like Google Book Search that other companies might not have pursued.

These are the things that make Google Google. It’s a strikingly different list of corporate characeristics than those of Microsoft or Yahoo or any other major Web company. And while every single thing that makes Google Google has been widely copied by other companies–sometimes very successfully–the whole package remains unique.

In the end, I can imagine a world without Google; I can imagine an Internet that’s just as wonderful without it; I can even imagine an Internet that’s better in certain respects. (People have been asking whether Google is too powerful for years, and even if the answer is “no, not really” right now, it may not stay that way forever.)

I still feel fortunate to have had it for ten years, though–and if I spend the rest of my life using Google in one form or another, it would neither surprise nor displease me…