I absolutely love Google. I might be the biggest evangelist for it in my circle. That partition ad that told everybody what a jhajariya was - I probably use all those nexus and google features before breakfast everyday.
Google is perhaps the most intriguing and definitely the most ambitious companies of our time. It has been long since it came out of it's humble search engine origins. A gargantuan theme is unfolding right in front of us daily and Larry Page and Sergei Brin are orchestrating it in the most subtlest way possible. Often it's how to see how the dots connect. For the most part critics keep questioning and dismissing some of their moves as 'moonshots' or 'yeah-if-i-had-a-few-billion-dollars-in-extra-income-every-year-i-would-too'. How many people could see massive sense in the following:
- (1998) Origins: we are building the world's 20th search engine at a time when most of the others have been abandoned as being commoditized money losers. We'll strip out all of the ad-supported news and portal features so you won't be distracted from using the free search stuff. (source)
- (2001) Weird idea 1: let's buy this company which makes 3-D views of the globe. Because nothing spells synergy better than a search engine company acquiring a 3-D viewing start-up. Maybe people want to see their results in 3-D!
- (2005) Weird idea 2: let us buy this operating system start-up for mobile phones. Because two years later Apple will come up with a wildly successful iPhone which will make the OS a dominating item in the otherwise stupid phones of today. THEN, we will market this as a 'flexible platform for everybody' and kick Apple's ass a decade later with 80% market share.
- (2005) Weird idea 3: Let's devote time and money in developing autonomous cars, a topic that established auto players haven't been able to crack yet. Business model? What business model?
- (2006) Weird idea 4: let's buy this video sharing platform that everybody is talking about for more money than what we made on our IPO. Can you not see the obvious link between sharing videos for free on the net and searching for the latest pirated episode of 'The Big Bang Theory'? Of course, it won't break even soon and may actually have no idea about how to actually make money. Hey, we started that way too!
- (2007) Weird idea 5: so there's this company which basically allows you to have 'number portability'. Yup, we should buy them out. You know, just in case.
- (2008) Weird idea 6: Remember Netscape and how Microsoft killed it with a free IE? Time to up the browser-wars ante with our own browser. Of course, it will be free. What do we do that isn't?
- (2008) Weird idea 7: quit thinking small. Let's launch a satellite already!
- (2010) Weird idea 8: time we started building wind farms.
- (2010) Weird idea 9: Let's give cheap and an order of magnitude faster internet connection to people. And let's force them to give up 25% of their data allocation as free to strangers.
- (2011) Weird idea 10: remember that failed mobile major, Motorola? Let's buy them out for more than the GDP of Albania.
- (2011) Weird idea 11: Let's launch a thousand balloons in the stratosphere so as to provide free internet connection to rural household through out the world. How's that for philanthropy Mr. Gates?
- (2012) Weird idea 12: Let's make mobiles which are better spec'd then an Apple iPhone and sell that for a loss to everybody. Yes, we do not have accountants.
- (2012) Weird idea 13: Let's build more physical products. Starting with a ridiculous looking spectacle which will beam information straight into your eyes 24X7. Now you see where we are going.
- (2013) Weird idea 14: Next target immortality. Let's fund that too. We don't even know what we are trying now.
- edit: (2013) Weird idea 15: Time to throw 80% of our fund money into one single company that builds a cute iPhone app for hailing taxis. The said company will also deliver kittens. Aww that's cute. We definitely will fund this big time! - courtesy Achal.
- (2013) Weird idea 16: 'Let's buy all the freaking robotics companies, just in case the robots take over the world!" - (courtesy Arun). And we will buy every company worth owning that there is. Twelve of them to kick-start a new fellowship of the bots with Google as the Gandalf.
Of course, to you the super-smart reader of this blog and dilbert comics (I absolutely love Dilbert and believe that the book "the dilbert future" should be mandatory reading in schools), all of the above makes complete sense. The gift of hind-sight helps too.
Next article we will see how we are all getting vendor-locked to Google.
PS: the 'Google's music' is a play on the 'music of the Ainur' in LoTR.
How can you miss this point? Invested in what is so far known as a car rental company. Not only it invested, rather allocated 80% of its total fund for the year into a single company which amounts to 2.5 times its fund value when it started in 2009. Not to mention the obvious, putting 80% of investments in single company is madness in the VC world.
ReplyDeletePS: I remember discussing something about google ad with you, perhaps around marketing. The challenge for Google search no longer comes from Yahoo or Bing, but from the specialised localised apps, which are coincidentally and remarkably hosted on the very platform that it owns and developed.
PPS: This post has potential to go viral :)
@achal: Google's done waaay too many things. Still should not have missed them. Added at #15!
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