Google ≠ Netscape ???
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
I had proposed the idea that Google was becoming the new Netscape, on the heels of news that Google had acquired Writely and MeasureMap, and later learned that they had also acquired @Last Software, makers of the fun-yet-powerful Sketchup.
But in a seemingly odd cue of events, I stumbled upon a couple of articles that talk about tabs, UIs, Google, and most importantly FireFox from one of the lead UI engineers over at the FireFox crew. What is most evident from this kind of post, is that Google is not Netscape. Netscape went from the fun-loving dragon to a slow, antiquated behemoth that buckled under its own weight: it couldn’t be more apparent if you look at where FireFox came from. Having said that, Google fascinates me as a business-model that grew exponentially and has not buckled under its own weight. One has to wonder, given that it is a publicly held company and that it does ultimately have investors to please, how this all comes together. One theory I have is that Google has the best damn database of user profiles to ever exist. If so many users are putting restaurant requests, emails, directional searches from our homes, our froogality [sic], our website addresses, our social networks through some of those sites, analytics of what kind of people we relate to through our websites, online chat transcripts, and most of our general web conciousness through their servers, how can they NOT be extrapolating and interpolating incredible reams of data on us?
My point being that Google has evolved from just a search engine to being somewhat of a social engine and this is something Netscape never planned on being, at least with their vision of how the web should be. Google is different. There lingers this great sense of philanthropy amongst their many busy bees, despite their somewhat malfunctioning search engine. I think Google will be more interesting to watch than Microsoft, as an evolving organization and business. Where will the size vs. product quality compromise occur in the organization and when?
UPDATE
Here’s some more related reading re: Google
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4816848.stm