Views of the world from outer space www.earth.google.com, pictures of street scenes anywhere around the country or globe www.maps.google.com.au, there hardly seems to be a month go by when those wizards at Mountain View have not trotted out some new fangled piece of whizz bangery for us to all marvel at.
However the fact remains that year after year Google www.google.com still earns nearly 95 per cent of all its mammoth, and still increasing, revenues from those ubiquitous text adverts that appear on the side of all its search results.
Some industry pundits are now privately expressing concerns once considered heresy: is this text connection not only the search kings’ greatest strength but, paradoxically, also its greatest weakness?
The proliferation of these visually appealing and, no doubt incredibly expensive, but to date commercially irrelevant, new inventions would seem to highlight the dilemma facing what is increasingly being seen, by knowledge management academics in particular, as effectively a one, albeit fabulous, product company looking desperately for the next big thing?
This recognition of its own vulnerability partially explains the shroud of secrecy that surrounds all aspects of their world-wide operations and the company’s vigorous defence of its perceived right to access virtually any organisations’ web content without permission or, in the case of copyright material, without payment.
In fact, there are numerous examples of how Google is completely different from nearly all other global corporations and is re-defining how business is actually conducted and overturning the orthodoxy prevalent for decades or in some instances hundreds of years.
At a basic level their approach to the sharing of advertising revenues is typical. For example, when Google uses an affilliate’s website to serve targeted AdWords, the website owner not only does not know what Google receives from the various advertisers (can vary as part of auctioning process) but in most instances does not even know what percentage of the total it actually receives.
Call me old fashioned but it’s a bit like someone putting a lodger in your back room and just paying you what they feel like … after they get paid.
I am not personally aware of a single instance in over four decades in business of this type of one way ‘trust me’ arrangement being employed in commerce. I can only assume this is another instance of the infamous ‘Golden Rule’, viz. those with the gold make the rules!
We are always being told that history has shown that there is nothing absolutely certain in this world and, what’s more, if we needed any further evidence, just think about the current global financial crisis.
At times when even institutions such as the venerable General Motors are under threat of extinction it seems illogical to assume Google will be able to continue to dominate search indefinitely - if it does not change its basic product offering.
As has been noted, by Silicon Valley legend Gordon Moore (famous for his Moore’s Law), large companies (and Google is an extremely large company these days) are like supertankers and it is extremely difficult for them to change direction.
Of course, that was over forty years ago and Gordon was talking about the incredibly successful semiconductor pioneer Fairchild at the time, i.e. before Intel was even launched!
But seemingly some things never do change! | 
