What if Google just shut up shop?
How often do you use Google? If, like me you use it daily, many times, what would you do if Sergey Brin and Larry Page decided they’d had enough fun online and instead of selling up, just closed the doors at Google and retired into their already vast fortunes?
Sure there are other search engines out there, such as Yahoo and MSN to name a few but do they give you what Google gives you? If they do, it’s worth wondering why Google holds such a massive market share.
- Google Adwords
If you think you’d be affected by this closure, just take a moment and think about the hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely, in some cases completely, on Google Adwords. Many business models involve Pay Per Click advertising and for Google, this is their largest revenue stream, $16.4 billion in 2007. - Google Organic Rankings
On top of this companies invest millions per year in online consultancy to try and ensure they appear on page one for their chosen key terms. If Google.com just hit a ‘Page not found message’ all of that investment will be lost, irretrievably, and ultimately all the traffic that created for the business being totally eradicated. - Google Analytics & Other Services
In addition to driving traffic to websites, what about all the other services Google provides, in particular Analytics? All the information and reporting available that enables businesses to understand their websites performance and improve on it.
There is no contract of service, no commitment from Google to provide these services over a certain time period, yet so many businesses have complete reliance on the traffic that Google sends to them.
So what if they did just shut up shop? What if tomorrow Google was a dead link? In a world already suffering a recession would the consequences of this be catastrophic? Possibly they would – that’s how powerful Google have become. So let’s hope they’re not planning on going out of business just yet…
3 Responses to “What if Google just shut up shop?”
-
This postis not as ridiculas as it sounds Chris. As you probably do I remember a time when Inkotomi through Yahoo dominated the search engine market. Where are they now? Google is the dominent search engine of choice for now, but for how long? Google knows this possibility exists which is why they spend so much on R&D - to keep ahead of the game. Good post.
Jaimie Dobson says:
-
Not to mention the millions of email accounts held in GMail and Google Apps (which also covers documents, spreadsheets, calendars, intranets etc etc!). Google have already started to shut down Google Notebook, and another company, providing image repositories, recently gave its membership 1 month to back everything up before they went to the wall and deleted it all!
-
Thanks for the comments, interesting observations. Never meant the post to sound ridiculous Jamie but thanks for the vindication! It’s a serious point, Google could just close, it’s a business like any other. What if there was some kind of fraud scandal or tax evasion case against the owners, Google could go out of business and the consequences could be catastrophic for so many businesses around the globe.
