The unique work culture at Google promotes innovation by allowing engineers to invest 20% of their work time in any new research as per their will. They can collect this duration for weeks or months together and take a extended break to work on the project of their choice. Google Suggest, AdSense for Content, Gmail and Google News are some of the things that these engineers managed in this 20% time. According to recent stats published by GigaOm (gigaom.com) Google tops the list of publicly listed tech companies in US that pay their engineers the most (with a large part of the paypack being performance based bonus).
A look at the Google Competitors:
Google wasn’t the first to start a search engine, but it saw great potential and worked up its way brilliantly. The old players in the market are still Google’s biggest competition (MSN, Yahoo, AOL etc). But hit by the recession / slowdown, taking on a giant in its domain isn’t easy for them. The product is the biggest advantage for Google. Till date no other search engine (IMO) comes even close to what Google delivers (Recently launched Bing looks impressive though). The lead is the same as Microsoft maintains in the OS market (yes I am in favor of a competition for Windows as well) and that Apple holds with iPod in MP3 players.
Google has steadily gained market share in recent years. From 77.66% in March’07 today it has risen to over 81%. Whereas all major competitors like Yahoo, MSN/Live, AOLetc have witnessed a decrease in their market share (i.e. none of them have managed to increase their market share, all have lost out to Google). (source: Hitslink)
The other set of Google competitors consist of startups like Cuil and Search Wikia. While Cuil saw a good opening and extensive coverage initially; since then it has went really cold. Search Wikia also failed to make a dent on Google’s market share and has finally been killed owing to global recession (Yes Jimmy Wales has pulled the plug on WikiaSearch).
So why the need?
The question is clear, why isn’t this article reading – Why we need a competitor for Windows!! But if you see a little more closely, Microsoft already has competitors who are delivering good products. The Mac is growing faster than the industry and Open source OSes is making steady progress. While on the other hand Google has only managed to improve its product & market share, whereas its competitors have even failed to put up a good fight.
A strong reason why I support startups like Cuil and Search Wikia (even Twitter if they enter search) and hope that they would be persistent with their attempt to innovate is that none of the Silicon Valley giants like Yahoo and MSN have delivered yet. But none of these startups are going to be a Google competitor for a while, so the best that we can certainly get is the Microsoft / Yahoo deal! Online publishers and small players are highly dependent on Google for their advertising revenues. Even companies like Mozilla gets 80% of its revenue from Google. Any competition in this space would mean better ROI to netrepreneurs.
Internet users are growing in millions each year. And Google taking more than 70% of the market is really sad. Why should only one company do all the innovation? All the right things? We deserve more, we wish to see a variety. So will someone deliver?
"A technology lover who wakes up every morning with a wish to see new gadgets, Annkur P Agarwal is the Editor of the OnlyGizmos Network and an e-commerce consultant based in Mumbai."
