5 Comments so far ↓

• Craig // Jul 31, 2010 at 12:00 pm

  Maybe their “attitude” will come down a few notches soon and they’ll stop killing PPC accounts and slapping people for no good reason. Would like to see PPC again how it was like 6 to 7 years ago. NO company is too big to fail

• Metodi // Jul 31, 2010 at 2:08 pm

  Hi Dave,

  thanks for posting information and articles that are not just a rehash of what other IM blogs talk about.

  Yep, refreshing to realize that big G has also its flaws and insecurities…

  At the end of the day, I think they will manage to stay on top, if they perhaps focus on one (or few) areas only and offer the best applications/service they can.

  They are smart and they can do it.

  Metodi

• Jerrico // Jul 31, 2010 at 7:10 pm

  I’ve been following google pretty closely over the past 6 months and I think the problem is either they are suffering from “typecasting” for companies (people think of them as a SE and can’t break out of the box to trust them on any other front) or bad business practices.

  I think that it’s not for lack of trying, they’ve acquired several companies, I assumed these were acquired to take their technology and integrate it into the SE or other things like the upcoming tablet PC, android phone (os) and so on.

  Google is starting to get a bad reputation for acquiring companies but never doing anything with them (as far as making money or even recouping the money they spent buying the business itself) and even disrupting the customers that made the company they bought valuable.

  Google is also B-slapping valid site owners for no reason other than a takedown notice, which they fail to properly investigate before destroying years of work (one blog site was ultra popular, and all materials (music and more) on the site was legit but in one swoop, the site was deleted based solely on a takedown notice (that was invalid)… this is bad business. We all know about the adsense slaps too.. I agree with the other commenter on this.

  I think a company’s reputation is paramount for success. They’ve proven they know search engines, and dominate the market both technologically and as a business, so people don’t generally question their SE business but based on past performance and complaints, and the recent privacy debacle (they were caught red handed selling peoples private information), I think people find it hard to trust them with anything else…

  Google will, however adapt, things will change soon, in fact they are saying that facebook is becoming people’s search engine for a lot of information, vs using the search engines… google will and they know this, need to jump into and be successful at having a social site, because if they fail to do this, and the format changes from SE (old school) to Social SE (newschool) they may become a dinosaur…

  Jerrico

• Faye Herl // Aug 1, 2010 at 8:19 am

  17% growth is great!-just not for Google. Being a cash cow is not the worst thing in the world. Geez!
  It appears that this is the same transition that every company has to go through to go to the next level-and it is very seldom done by the founders of the company. Unfortunately, there may have to be more of a downward trend over the next several quarters before somebody there , who already has a solution to the problem, is fully allowed to implement it.

• Matt // Aug 2, 2010 at 6:12 pm

  Hey Dave, great article.

  Google to the little guy reminds me of how Yahoo/Overture was back in 2003 or so when they were the only game in town when it came to a PPC perspective. Yahoo acted like they were the Byzantine empire back then and drove away a lot of customers and business in the process, which Google took full advantage of.

  Now Google is doing the same thing to a lot of their bread and butter customers, and it’s only a matter of time before someone else provides an alternative. Facebook maybe??

  Google needs to start employing more business people with common sense and not as many engineers in my opinion.

  Anyways I am not calling an end to Google’s reign at all at the moment but certainly they will have more challenges on the road to “becoming the web” as they have publicly stated as one of their goals…