Today’s announcement that Facebook and Bing are joining forces is being hailed as a major blow to Google. But before we start chiseling a headstone, let’s think about Google’s week so far:
- Thanks to a massive wind farm off the East Coast of the country, Google is in the power generation game.
- Sony’s new HDTVs bring Google’s Android operating system into the living room.
- The new Google car prototype doesn’t even need a human driver – making those Google/Skynet comparisons a little too real.
All this adds up to the fact that Bing may lap Google in the search battle, but that’s swiftly becoming less important to Google’s business model – which has always been about collecting data from different points of your daily life and using that to serve you ads.
Maybe the wind farm doesn’t obviously fit into that (although, their servers crank up an awful lot of heat and use lots of electricity to crunch all your data). But turning the family TV room into a Google-fueled den and knowing exactly where people are driving are both pretty advantageous for an advertising company. The possibilities for each of these technologies in 20 years is mind-blowing.
Facebook will continue to be valuable because of the value it offers in organizing our relationships, but Google remains one step ahead in its quest to organize (and monetize) the world’s information.
Jim Eltringham 