April 10th, 2007
Google's big, bad risk
The real story in Yahoo’s feather in the cap multi-year exclusive sponsored search and contextual ads agreement with Viacom Web properties announced today?
No, it is not that it is a $1 billion YouTube lawsuit slap in the face to Google, it is that it puts Google’s entire raison d’etre at risk, but the risk is not a copyright infringement one, it is a risk unique to Google and it is a world wide risk.
The inexorable Google risk is the inevitable conflicts that Google’s real desire to own at once all of the world’s content, without paying for it, AND all of the world’s advertising breeds.
CEO Eric Schmidt on his worldwide domination ambitions:
We said we are in the search business, so we need all of the information. We want to partner with people to get information so our search users can see it.
We're also in the advertising business, and we'd like to provide advertising services to people who have their own proprietary content. So depending on where we are in that spectrum, we either do an advertising deal or a content deal or a hybrid deal.
But ultimately our goal at Google is to have the strongest advertising network and all the world's information, that's part of our mission.
Google does not merely want to have its cake and eat it too, it wants to control and make money off of every iota of the cake’s life cycle:
Google Scholar: Cake history
Google Apps: Recipe writing
Google Search: Vendor sourcing
Google Gmail: Factory communication
Google News: Union troubles
Google AdWords: Cake contest
Google AdSense: Website leverage
Google Checkout: Cake sales
Google Maps: Cake retail
Google’s YouTube: Cake video…
Every single man, woman and child, is a Google target user and/or partner and/or advertiser and every single school, government, organization and business is a Google target user and/or partner and/or advertiser.
Is such a scenario really tenable, all over the world, in every market?
Google’s heretofore unblemished track record in exploiting its monopoly like position via coopetition to its for very high profit advantage is being tested, as I discuss in Can Google handle search engine coopetition?
Viacom’s refusal to stand for the Google business model belief that it alone is not required to compensate others for the commercial use of their content has not only put Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in jeopardy, it has exposed the inherent, unsurmontable conflicts of interest the Google world domination mission yields.
Goolge's big, bad risk is that its Googley modus operandi is not sustainable.
ALSO: How Google’s new ecommerce engine can mislead consumers and
Google aims to usurp campus email systems and
Google News is NOT newspaper driven: Zell vs. Schmidt and
Why Google IS afraid of Microsoft, big time
