Predictive Mobile Search Figures High On Google’s Future Feature List; What Will Googzilla Do Next?
Red Herring gives us a peek at a breakfast seminar full of surprises. Stepen Arnold, a renowned search analyst, used last week’s Web 2.0’s iBreakfast in New York City to share insights from his upcoming book Google: The Calculating Predator. (I highly recommend you peruse his site, which is chock-full of great features including a comprehensive list of Google patents. It’s a find that has really made my day and you can bet I will win him over for a column at MSG – or at least an edgy Q&A.)
Back to the breakfast, Stephen discussed some of Google’s milestone patents and concludes predictive mobile search is next on the search giant’s agenda. It makes sense since predictive search is more accurate than other approaches and can reduce latency – the curse of mobile communications – by queuing up answers in advance. Stephen pointed out that Google’s patent application 20060230350, filed in October 2006, uses variations on the word “predict” more than 20 times. (Red Herring elaborates: The patent application says that a system could enable an “I’m Feeling Doubly Lucky” search, a reference to Google’s current “I’m Feeling Lucky” system which lets a web surfer type a search phrase and go directly to the site deemed the most relevant. In “doubly lucky” mode, the system could help the user complete a word or phrase automatically, conduct a search, and direct the user to the top match.)
Stephen has identified 17 telephony-related patents and patent applications by Google and another dozen with a tangential link. “That means 11 to 12 percent of Google’s innovation effort since 1999 is in telco,” he said. “Somebody at Google cares about this telephony stuff.” Against this backdrop, Stephen isn’t as quick as the rest of us to dismiss recent rumors of a Google phone. He figures we’ll see a prototype handset in “six to eight months.”
Stephen’s own press release does a good job of divining Google’s other intentions. He identifies a “surprisingly aggressive change in tactics Google made when shifting from its Appliance approach to network-centric enterprise applications.” Google’s potent distributed computing platform blurs the line between general search and true enterprise applications such as value-added processing, analytics and data services.
As Stephen puts it: “It’s easy and popular to focus on Google’s ad revenue and its 70 percent plus share of worldwide Web searches, but there are real dollars Google is going after moves beyond Microsoft to the more lucrative revenue streams controlled by IBM, Oracle and telecommunications companies. Google has squeezed the consumer search sector, and now it is targeting the enterprise. Competitors will have to find ways to surf on Google, not be swamped by its waves of innovations.”
And then this powerful conclusion from the man who openly refers to Google as Googzilla and espouses that it’s increasingly clear Google is more than search. “Fighting Google is risky. Developing systems and solutions that take advantage of the disruption Google causes is the way to generate money from new content and search technologies.”
NOTE: This point of view jives with the mission of this site and my personal passion for Blue Ocean Strategy, a must-read book that too few operators and mobile companies have read (if they had, then we’d have more innovation and less desperation in the mobile space. Witness the widespread panic over the future of the mobile portal and the march of Internet brands…)
For those unfamiliar with the message, here’s a helpful summary. The authors (W.Chan Kim, Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson Chair Professor of International Management at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and Renée Mauborgne, INSEAD Distinguished fellow and a professor of strategy and management) separate the business universe into red oceans – the known market space where companies compete for a greater share of existing demand – and blue oceans – the unknown market space populated by industries not yet in existence today and where demand is created rather than fought over. Google, Ebay and Amazon are prime examples of blue ocean companies.
Indeed, blue oceans are about doing business where there is no competitor – setting up new land and not dividing up what’s out there. I had the pleasure of interviewing Renèe in 2004 when I was researching a series on High Performance on behalf of Accenture (later published by the Wall Street Journal and posted in the Library section of this site for you to enjoy). Her ideas are more relevant than ever: “With supply increasingly exceeding demand in the marketplace, companies stuck in the red ocean will find themselves marginalized. To break out of the red ocean view of the market, the first step is recognizing that they are in it and that there are infinite opportunities to create blue oceans of uncontested market space….High performance will increasingly rest on creating blue oceans, not outpacing the competition in existing market space.”
