Breaking Google And The Browser Paradigm
Is BROWSER the paradigm, or is GOOGLE the real paradigm of the World Wide Web?
The Browser Paradigm
The browser is a paradigm, one that has well and truly hit the mainstream. The browser is the window through which we see the World Wide Web and the World Wide Web is what most people think the Internet is. Is it? Or are we missing the big picture?
Most of us see the online world through the browser, but use Google for navigation. A large proportion of Web users don’t even use the address bar on the browser; instead they type the site name into Google and click the result.
In the Web space Google is the monopoly. You might say that there is no World Wide Web anymore, only Google and the sites hanging off it. Google is what AOL was before it, and what CompuServe was before AOL: It is the dominant umbrella for all Web activities. If you are high up in Google searches, you are blessed with traffic; if you are low, you are cursed.
With this dominant position Google makes vast fortunes. Google is a great money vacuum that sucks out $20,000 million dollars of income from the world economy by, what youngsters would define as, “ownage” of the World Wide Web. Web site owners pay this $20 billion to curry favor with Google so that it provides prominent navigation to the net hordes.
Google indirectly, through advertising, takes $3 a month from every man, woman and child in the U.S. This is what drives its profit juggernaut. It’s a gigantic slice of the U.S. marketing pie. It is no wonder that other advertising-reliant media is sagging under the weight of competition.
The Google Paradigm
Google is the distribution channel of Web content as it controls the navigation and propagation of traffic on the Web. Yet what happens if content owners move the content, which is after all “the king,” off the Web? In the old media example, cheap, profitable dross will fill the gap left by the expensive quality product. However under the old homily that content is king, the distribution pipeline that is the Web should shrivel and die.
What will actually happen and is it happening already? Is the greedy Google 50/50 Ad Sense deal with content owners already asphyxiating the Web? I hate to say it, but I think it probably is.
Google pull Micrasoft
While Google is trying to pull Microsoft platforms into a browser, the world is jumping out of the browser window into network applications. So, while on the surface, content owners seem locked into a slow Internet death, if they can break the paradigm of the WWW by producing autonomous applications rather than operating under a collectivist browser, they can recapture their old business model and identity.
The good thing about the net is, if it is possible, someone will do it on the cheap and then the titans will follow. In a way, World of Warcraft has already proved the model. Its billion dollar sales is on a scale with Google’s mighty revenue and it is an app first and a website second. Blizzard owns its customer, not Google. Google has no lock on WoW, but it’s a different story with Web media owners who quake at losing favor with the $20 billion a year sales monopoly that rations traffic as it sees fit.
It’s always a bad idea to fight the current winner in investing, but it is also a good idea to look for a future contestant. As such, keep your eyes out for a new generation of non-browser application producers as the next Internet generation will be like the one before: giant slayers.
