Cyberspace Monopolies and The Search Engine Market

“Come up with a field of interest in culture and technology to write your dissertation on and come up with something you can make worth 40 credits linked directly to your dissertation, in a week”

Nice, no rush, no pressure, no none at all. Next, I did what I always do when faced with a challenge got silly drunk and put off thinking about it in anyway till the next day. There is some reason behind this before you stop reading! Firstly let’s get one thing straight, drinking wasn’t required, however it’s the week after freashers week and as I’m going to be bogged down with work for the rest of this term (at least) I needed to get more fun out of the way. Secondly, I can never completely remove something from my mind and as I have found by experience, something great just seems to come to me after a couple of days pondering the problem, most of the time in the shower oddly enough. I don’t know why or how it happens it just does.

The theory proved accurate, thankfully. I am going to look into the field of internet super companies and whether they can actually monopolise a given market, given the ‘open’ barriers to entry, to any market on the internet. And the project? I hear you say. No, I’m not going to monopolise the market to prove it can be done. What I am going to do is take an already monopolised market, convert it to an online market and innovate on it. Three simple steps, which will no doubt be very hard. I am going to take Microsoft’s dominant operating system Windows, build an online OS (obviously not as complex as Windows) and innovate. Innovation being the key, seeing as after reading The Google Story I can pretty much conclude that Google is where it is now due 70% to innovation. In a sentence they took a service (internet search) innovated on it and tore the market apart because their search was just better than the competition, thus I intend to do that.

The first part of the book really talks about Google’s early days on the internet when it was just a PhD project for Sergey and Larry, before it became the super search that it is today. What was interesting at this point was how Sergey and Larry where so confident that their search engine could revolutionise the internet and how big ‘portal’ companies like Yahoo and MSN where concentrating on being a portal and not internet search. I think this played a major factor in bringing Google to where is it today, without these competitors completely writing off search technology in Google’s early days when it wouldn’t have been able to compete if Yahoo and MSN had tried, allowed Google to grow fast but not at a pace which wasn’t possible.

The second key factor to Google’s search monopoly is its concentration on innovation. A theme which is consistent throughout the book and if I am honest every paper, article and story I read on a technology super company has the same theme, innovation, innovation, innovation. It is without doubt what is keeping Google ahead of the game now. The competition in the search engine market is fierce, now that Google have shown they can make millions from it (also covered in The Google Story) and what keeps Google ahead of their competitors is innovation. Innovation from some of the best mathematicians and computers scientists on the planet, which is another interesting chapter in The Google Story; recruitment.

The book in itself talks about many aspects of Google’s business in the early days through to now. What is fantastic about the book is allot of the key principles that got Google where they are now can be drawn out from this book and played into another company. Of course you need a relatively open market and a revolutionary product as well, but there have been plenty of those that have failed due to lack of leadership. What The Google Story does is shine some insight into how Sergey and Larry became leaders to take their product to the world.