Published on September 13, 2010 Google still has Facebook in its sights
With two relative failures in a foray into social networking, Google is not giving up on its mission to take on Facebook.
Google is taking stock of the good and the bad from its two failed attempts in the world of social networking, Google Wave and Google Buzz. It has signalled that it’s serious with its social media strategy through a number of business acquisitions of smaller social networking gaming software companies – in some cases for quite sizable investments. Facebook hasn’t seen the back of Google yet.
Google’s strategy is driven by the fact that as social networking tools like Facebook grow, it’s only a small jump to people doing their searches from within the social networking tool instead of visiting a separate website. We think that while there’s a lot of logic in this statement, we think that this is only a partial reason to invest millions of dollars in a strategy that may or may not work. After all, although people could well and good start doing searches in Facebook, would Facebook really be able to overthrow the search engine market and claim dominance when Yahoo! and Bing can not? Some will argue that of all the aggressive businesses out there, Facebook has the arrogance and the capability to do it, but we think not. They are not as careful and calculating as Google when it comes to rolling out new strategies and the recent privacy debacles involving Facebook suggest that their corporate strategy is more of a try it now, fix it later than a structured, logical strategy.
We agree with many of the analysts and commentators who have suggested Google run a risk of spreading themselves too thinly by competing to be #1 in too many things. But with US$30 billion in their bank account doing nothing, one thing’s for sure: we’re going to see them give it a go. They are locked and loaded. Look out Facebook!
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