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Google: Growth beyond search 2:45
The tech giant generates the majority of its profits from search. Where will it turn to become a diversified company?
Do you think that Google won't be able to escape going forward? One is that when you hire so many people, they can’t all be Rhodes Scholars and genius of other sorts, and the other problem is that it will be extremely difficult for any Google employee to make anywhere near the kind of wealth, that the early Google employees made. It’s just not possible in a company with 19,000 people to make a hundred million dollars, and so, the people who are truly motivated by money or who have an idea but they think it’s going to be the next Google are going to have no choice but to leave Google to pursue their dreams.
You know it’s funny to think about the challenge that Google faces because it has been so successful, because it’s so profitable, but the fact of the matter is that Google really only has one revenue stream, that this is a very sensitive topic around Google, because they know that mature, great companies have a diversified revenue stream, they have multiple products, they have multiple hits, and so Google is doing a lot of things, it owns YouTube, it’s trying to do advertising for radio and for television and for newspapers, it’s trying to get into this plate advertising. So far, none of these things have worked in a big way, now that doesn’t mean that Google won’t have some hits at some point, it also doesn’t mean that Google is going to run into financial trouble anytime soon. As a matter of fact, it’s extremely unlikely that that will happen. But at some point, and I can’t tell you when, they will need to have other products that produce billions of dollars of revenue the way search advertising does, and they are very aware of that.
The working on a handful of things that some of which already are producing money just not serious money in the Google sense, so for example, Google has a series of products called Google LABS, which are online versions of a lot of the products that Microsoft has like word processing and spreadsheets and email program, that’s a multi hundred million dollar business for Google right now, but that’s nothing compared to the similar business that Microsoft has that they are emulating, Google also is working on providing open software for social networking sites, it’s doing something very similar called Android, which is a software for cellular phone carriers. The goal in both cases is to try to get this broad community of people using Google software so that they can then feed those people into Google’s advertising engine. These are big initiatives, there are multi-year initiatives, and it’s simply too soon to say if this will turn into the kind of financial rewards, that Google has reaped for its advertising products so far.
