Haute Prospect

Is Google shooting itself in the foot – a la Microsoft?

There is no doubt Google rules the search landscape leaving its closest competitors further in the dust month after month. Now that Microsoft-Yahoo merger rumors slowly exhaust will anyone ever catch up? Or will Google, tempted to maintain its growth rate and market share, make mistakes seen only in the pre-Microsoft regulation era? Will Google lose its focus on search while sticking its fingers into radio, tv, video, video games or display ads or is it all a part of CEO Schmidt’s strategy he calls – Universal Search?

We’re not psychic here at HauteProspect, but could the danger to Google’s domination be coming from their own house. Genius that drives them slowly towards monopoly may soon get in the way. Click fraud is becoming more serious of an issue each month which is only now being seriously tackled by Google through war against adsense arbitrage but stems from low quality control of their powerful ad distribution network. Latest ideas of ‘personalized search’ or how it is now called ‘web history’ are great and in line of Schmidt’s strategy, but is Google forgetting about privacy? How many people are actually opting into their ‘web history’ what is effectively becoming Google’s behavioral targeting network? How many users will favor being profiled while playing video games? (nothing wrong with behavioral targeting of course – relevancy in marketing is what we’re here all about) Privacy advocates are concerned however. FTC is looking at the latest G’s acquisition – DoubleClick (company with history of lawsuits brought by privacy advocates). The European regulators have been monitoring the behemoth’s moves as well.

We continue working with Google’s technologies as they do wonders for our clients’ ROI; and would hate to see company being forced to be broken down – so Googlers – keep the growth under control – change the world one step at the time for your own good.

Yours,

HauteProspect