Google’s announcement that their revenues have increased by 24% over the last year shows the search engine juggernaut keeps rolling on.
It’s tempting to think that Google is untouchable and that’s certainly how it appears when you’re on track to earn forty billion dollars a year and book close to 40% of that income as profits.
On the same day, Sony announced a massive restructure including with 10,000 redundancies and the company’s CEO, Kazuo Hirai, spoke of a sense of urgency to address the once dominant corporation’s drift into irrelevance.
Twenty years the thought of Sony – one of the world’s innovators in consumer electronics – would be wallowing in the wake of companies like Apple and unknown upstarts like Google was unthinkable.
Fortunes are won and quickly lost in a time of great change and this is something we should keep in mind about Google when we look at their rivers of gold.
“Rivers Of Gold” was a term coined to describe the advertising riches of the newspaper industry in the 1980’s. Google’s online advertising is partly responsible for destroying that business.
Today Google is a search engine business that makes its money from the advertising that deserted print media and went online.
It may be that manufacturing mobile phones, running “identity services” disguised as social media platforms or augmented reality spectacles are the future of Google but right now they it’s search and advertising that pays the bills and books the massive profits.
The challenge for Google is not to lose sight of its current core business while building the future rivers of gold.
If Google’s leaders can’t manage this, then they risk following the newspaper industry that they themselves disrupted.