Summary of a talk I had with Danny Kirschner last summer, when the Google IPO was announced:

[amended using present-day examples]

Google’s not the next Microsoft – they’re the next Electricity. They’re turning their search tech into a commodity.

Forget their services – their goal isn’t for GMail to take over email. They don’t want to host everyone’s content. But by offering a Gig of storage, they’re sending their ‘competitors’ scrambling, and now Yahoo! and Hotmail have to offer more storage. Google is not trying to offer competing services – that ‘small change’ is a red herring to keep their competitors occupied with trying to beat Google; and Google will let them. What Google is doing is trying to flood you with so much native data – your complete archive of email, photos, etc… that the only way you can possibly aggregate all that data is with Google… The key part of their search tech, Pagerank, of which is by the way patented. So they have that cornered.

Once everyone has 15 GB of email, the only way to organize it will be with Google Search. And everyone will need it.

Take Flickr for example. Google just doesn’t care. Let Yahoo! Host everyone’s photos. Once they’re all up there, they’re going to need to find what they’re looking for, and that’s where Google comes in. See Google’s involvement with Riya, which organizes your photos by using facial recognition. Can anyone can compete with that?

Every service Google offers is not trying to take over – they are simply assembling the pieces of a greater puzzle which they will, in a few years, implement. You’re seeing the crumbs of the ingredients, and maybe tasting the batter, but wait till you see what they’ve got cooking in the kitchen:

Either that, or I’m just incredibly overestimating them, in which case they’re in for a crash..

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