Something that has continually surprised me since starting a job is how often companies repeat the mistakes countries and armies of the old world have been making for centuries. Perhaps this is a foolish statement because huge countries still make them but it seems to me at least at a lower frequency than in history.
The economist has an interesting article likening Google to Napoleon at the start of the 19th Century when he was advancing and succeeding on all fronts, the economist likens eBay, MSN, Yahoo to the enemies of Napoleon at that time and further to that they note these companies are already stricking similar allegiances to those set up in the 19th Century to battle the little man.
I think perhaps the economist takes their argument too far but good grief they have a great point. I personally would prefer to look at the armies of the third reich or Wilhelm II (pehaps that is because I loved history at school and I studied WWI and II not the Napoleonic wars). Now don't get me wrong I don't think Google is evil like the third reich and I certainly don't want to insult them at all, there are some great people in Mountainview and around the world working for Google. I merely want to take a quick look at how their tactics compare to the military and political tactics of those regimes, not any of the social attacks. Google is right now a force for social GOOD IMHO.
Google is technologically superior to their competitors like DE in both wars, Google has made massive progress in a short blitzkreig against the old empires of Yahoo and MSN with Search, eBay with Checkout/Base and even smaller companies like YouTube with Video. They have forged alliances like those which formed the Axis powers in both wars by buying companies like urchin or working v. closely with the Mozilla Foundation. Now I don't want to oversimplify conflicts I spent 4yrs studying at school but I feel I am not being too controversial when I say that at the end of WW I when DE broke the lines and roared into France they overstretched themselves and esp. their supply lines which was a major contributing factor to their defeat and in WWII DE had simply too many fronts and could not sustain battles on every front. Finally their lack of focus on destroying the UK (esp. the retargetting of their aircampaign to cities and not airfields) allowing it to be a US staging point and their disaster over-stretching their supply lines in Russia at the wrong time of yearbrought them down.
Has Google overlooked and failed to kill off a key competitor (Yahoo?/ISPs?) and are they reaching into a new market that could become a Russia (ecommerce?)...
Only time will tell but it's gonna be interesting seeing if they acheive something history seems to tell us is really difficult in business as well as war. You cannot have a war on multiple fronts and win. With search (Yahoo/MSN), ecommerce (eBay/PayPal) and Advertising (Newspapers/advertising companies) I think google has at least three fronts (let alone all their upcoming plans for Wireless etc...).
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