Google's First Hubristic Leap: Competing With the Internet

Google’s (GOOG) hubris may have finally gotten the better of them. See this from the official Google blog about the launch of Knol, the Wikipedia-About.com-Associated-Content it just officially launched:

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people’s heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.

So Google is now going to fill in the gaps in human knowledge? That is its first hubristic leap. The next: that we need Google to create a means for sharing knowledge. That is what the internet itself does. Every page, every blog, post, every media article is precisely that.

So now Google is competing not just with media, but with the entire internet and everyone who publishes on it.

This is terribly dangerous for Google. Obviously, since I’m writing a book called What Would Google Do?, I admire them and their self-awareness about their role on the internet. But this displays a clueless arrogance that is shocking from them. Have they been arrogant? Yes. But clueless? No.

But now Google is in direct conflict with everyone it wants to serve via search and advertising. Google is making itself the enemy.

Danny Sanchez quotes Eric Schmidt saying what Google has always said — and what I have repeated — when media companies fear it:

It’s better to think of Google as a technology company. Google is run by three computer scientists, and Google is an innovator in technology in our space. We’re in the advertising business – 99% of our revenue is advertising-related. But that doesn’t make us a media company. We don’t do our own content. We get you to someone else’s content faster.

You might ask how this is different from Google providing platforms such as Blogger and Blogspot. I suspect that’s the way Google is thinking of it. But now Google is creating its own media brand. Second, it is making a claim of authority. Says the official blog:

Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. . . .

Google is also confirming the most common complaint about the internet: that it’s filled with crap. By this act, Google is agreeing, for it says we need Google to come along and create find the people who can create uncrap. That is precisely a media argument: that openness does not produce quality or credibility.

Google: stop before it’s too late. Competing with those you serve — from a position of unbeatable advantage — isn’t just bad business. It’s evil.

: It’s not as if Google wasn’t warned. Here were Danny Sullivan and Duncan Riley fearing that Google had gone a step too far when word of Knol got out in December.

Comments

[BayAreaGoogleGuy]

No other tech firm should be concerned with Google other than in search because Google is that one trick pony.

Nothing else has generated any measurable revenue for Google than search.

The problem for Google is they are terrible at marketing and even worse in customer service.

[tombo]

Don't know why you think "This is terribly dangerous for Google". As you say it's competing with other sites out there like about.com, etc. It's not breaking any new ground, and it's not in any way competing with their search business.

This is just another one of dozens of content ideas cooked up by their engineers. Maybe it will pay off maybe it won't. It won't even be a blip on their earnings if it fails, and it probably won't add more than a fraction of a percent if it succeeds. A big yawn-fest if you ask me.

[Atli3ns]

I agree with tombo about other advertising companies shouldn't be concerned, but it will be big without a terribly dangerous outcome

[MichaelinWa]

Huh? You can't tell me they aren't stating the obvious regarding content on the Internet. Filing "gaps"? They don't say that. I think you're misreading the strategy here. If people want to get to the most credible ("credible" is a load term) info fast (a point of debate, perhaps) then the concept has merit. Personally, I think it does have merit, but that's just me. I just don't see the "info control" argument, especially since Knol is user driven.

[User 232230]

First, they never said they are filling in 'gaps in human knowledge' - just its availability on the web.

Next, while 'every page, every blog, post, every media article' helps share human knowledge, these are not the last word in the realm of tools for sharing knowledge. The internet is still evolving. This step is very much aligned with Google's goal of organizing the worlds information.