"OBJECTS IN MIRROR MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR"
Over the weekend, John Battelle (of the best-selling Google book fame), had a good post up titled "From Service to Application" where he asked rhetorically:
"...it struck me that what we are seeing right now is indeed the evolution of search companies from their roots providing a single service - one thing, done well - to a application suite that does many things. What does that mean, exactly?"
The question was in response to an exchange at a conference with the CEO of a vertical search startup who was inevitably asked how he would compete with Google. As John describes it,:
"...the most interesting comment of the night...came from Simply Hired CEO, Gauta Godhwani, when I asked him if he feared Google. "Google does search very well, but we have yet to see Google do applications well," was his reply."
Reading this took me back almost two decades to the mid-eighties when at a tech conference, a French dude running the leading the programming tools market for Microsoft's then leading MS-DOS operating system, was asked about what Microsoft might do in the programming tools market.
The reply roughly paraphrased was, "Microsoft does operating systems very well, but we have yet to see Microsoft do applications very well."
Or something like that. My french isn't that good.
Then, a company who had the leading spreadsheet application at the time was asked the same question, to which came a similar reply.
Eerily, there was almost exactly the same response by the guy heading the leading word processing company at the time as well.
Then, seeing a headline this morning brought me fiercely back to the present.
Both ZDNet and the New York Times had articles on Google entering the search analytics market. As ZDNet describes it:
Google is set to launch on Monday a free Web analytics service that will let companies see exactly how visitors interact with their Web site and how their advertising campaigns are faring.
The free hosted service, which will be available in English and 16 other languages, is based on technology from San Diego-based Urchin, which Google acquired in March.
The NY Times article has a good description on the potential impact on the almost half a billion dollar "search analytics" industry that has sprung up around Google and other portals' search offerings:
"The new service will cause significant ripples in the analytics industry, said Eric T. Peterson, an analyst with Jupiter Research, an Internet consultant. "This will really start to get a lot of companies interested in improving their Web sites," Mr. Peterson said.
Just 17 percent of the 250,000 or so companies with at least $1 million in annual revenue and a Web site now use analytical tools and services for those sites, Mr. Peterson said. The remaining 83 percent have been deterred by the cost of such tools, among other things. "And now here comes Google," he said.
The industry currently attracts about $460 million in revenue, divided between publicly traded companies like WebSideStory and privately held firms like WebTrends, Omniture and others.
Until March, that group also included Urchin, an analytics company based in San Diego. Google acquired Urchin for what people familiar with the deal said was about $30 million. Until now, the unit operated as it had before the deal, offering analytics services for a minimum of about $200 monthly, and much more for bigger customers.
Competitors like WebSideStory, WebTrends, I.B.M. and others, Mr. Peterson said, "will have to seriously address how to compete in this market now."
"When you put Google's application next to any one of the existing ones, you'll not see glaring differences except that one of them is free," he said."
Deja vu.
History does repeat itself.
Last time I checked, analytics are search tools. Next stop, Applications.
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