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Google (GOOG) is flying high right now, but fears are growing among the technorati that the...
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Saturday, September 22, 2012, 5:30 PM ETGoogle (GOOG) is flying high right now, but fears are growing among the technorati that the embrace of mobile apps and "closed" social networking platforms will gradually diminish the value of the company's search empire. John Battelle recently summed up this view. "Google’s core model – built on the open, linked world of the web – is under threat from the advance of the iPhone and the app, the Facebook and the Path ... and countless other “unlinked” digital artifacts." (also)
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Google can still sell display ads for those apps through AdMob, but they don't dominate mobile display ads the way they dominate search.
Second chart in that article. It is important to remember that most smartphone users do not upgrade every time a new handset comes out. Many smartphone users keep the same handset for the entire 2 year contract, and quite often longer than that. It will take a few years until any meaningful impact is made from in-app searches on mobile. I would expect GOOG is not sitting still while the mobile landscape develops.
something we can not imagine right now, but eventually, it will happen sooner that we can think
The key limiting difficulty for mobile platforms are the laws of chemistry. Battery energy density is scaling at very sub Moore's law rates. Meanwhile phones are being stuffed with necked down quadcore processors. Nokia put a 42 mp camera chip in a phone. The bottom line is that battery energy density is the limiter to phone functionality. Not to mention the bandwidth issues with moving data through the air.
Meanwhile back at places like Google, search should be getting more capable in multidimensional ways. Search will be expanded in hard directions requiring lots of processing power and bandwidth to match platforms running search that exploit the energy and data pipes wallplugs.
That said... The Internet, Search, and the new delivery mechanisms for information presentation and access is the current focus for us all. PCs, laptops, smart phones, tablets and anything new that is in the pipeline are just consumer delivery systems for information. It is changing at lightening speed and is a wild ride for those of us that love human progress. As I see it the tech sector consists of brilliant inventions that enable cool information and communication delivery ideas and the creation of hardware and software to deliver them. Steve Jobs' genius recognized this and enhanced the graphical interface that greatly advanced this. Jobs was not the only one in the past that should get credit. Starting with the integrated circuit in the 60s I can name hundreds of past events just as important.
Google is still in the wheel house of the tech sector. I am happy that they have made the leap into the hardware side of information delivery. As a stockholder and greedy capitalist I also approve of Google's understanding that a tech company structures must be able to change quickly if they are to continue to grow and stay relevant. Smart phones and Tablets and their current features will not significantly change Google's long term success. Their ability to change direction quickly will.