The CEO of Google has no designs on monopolizing the Internet. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Eric Schmidt said the way of the Web is partnerships. "It will not end up in a structure with one dominant company. It will be a collection." The reason is, he said, "Because the advertising industry, which monetizes it, is not a single-solution space." Schmidt expects there will be consolidation as the years pass and various companies will grow quite large.
As to the nature of Google, Schmidt said some people get the wrong idea when they hear about the company's culture including lava lamps, pets and free food. "We’re every analytical. We measure everything, and we systematized every aspect of what's happening in the company," he told the Times. For example, Schmidt said he was already getting hourly activity reports on the spreadsheet product that was released last week. "We’re just ruthless with respect to watching all these metrics, so we know what's going well and what's going poorly."
Disclaimer: I own shares of Google.
Google has every intention of monopolizing the Internet, helping itself to an ever increasing share of the sales revenue of every company on the Internet (which will be just about every company soon) and collecting personal information that will make your head spin.
The toolbar tracks peoples' behavior, analytics shows them how much traffic is worth to other companies, GBuy may provide them with very detailed information about what each individual buys, all the searches that led up to the puchase, how much was paid, and when people are likely to buy. If you don't log out of your Google account, you are cookied and potentially being tracked.
They never say just what ther intentions are to keep everyone guessing and off-balance. They like to seem like a nice cool company that makes it easy for everyone to do everything but the pay back in the data they collect will be immense.
Posted by: Rich | Jun 13, 2006 at 00:42