Google’s mission statement anno 2024 is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
The failure to execute against that mission since the rise of LLMs has been epic.
I’m not talking about the recent damage to their stock price or the latest earnings calls.
I’m talking about Google no longer being relevant to how humanity accesses useful information from 2024 onwards, and not having the wherewithal to take decisive action on that change.
Here’s the situation:
- The way the world’s information was organised for the past 10 years was all over the web - hyperlinks connecting the dots - search engines in the middle (mostly Google) to index it and serve either in full or in snippets based on user searches.
- In the last year, huge portions of the world’s information has been SMASHED into LLMs, and it’s far more “universally accessible” and “useful” to just ask ChatGPT than it is to start doing your own research on Google.
- There is no realistic future where LLMs don’t continue improve over time, or technical alternatives surpass their ability dramatically.
Google’s strategy was to hold and defend a position where they were the strongest player that was able to deliver on their mission statement
… and to continue to build the moat with incremental improvement in the user experience and the vastness of the tool
… and to monetise with ads in an auction designed to increase costs for advertisers over time
That strategy has been invalidated by the total reconfiguration of how we seek information. The defensible position has been smashed.
Google’s response has been to adopt a belated copycat strategy with Gemini, constantly 3 steps behind on functionality, quality, and product releases when compared to competing solutions (OpenAI, Claude, even perplexity).
This strategy seems inadequate, and one can only hope for Google that there is a much stronger play going on behind closed doors. Otherwise, they have stepped from market-leading with a moat and a solid defensive strategy, to a follower playing catch-up.
This isn’t the only place Google has had woeful execution in the past decade.
- Google+ was supposed to be a serious competitor in social media. It launched at the same time (ish) as Pinterest, Insta and Snapchat. Google failed to execute on an incredible opportunity (albeit very far from their strategic core!) - and not for lack of market potential, looking at who they launched next to.
- Google connected home products - what happened to the hype? (Google holds less than 5% of the connected home market - and their voice assistant is still the most frustrating experience ever, with almost no helpful integration to other google services)
- Google podcasts is being sunset, having been beaten out of a HUGE and growing market by open source software like Pocket Casts. Google is trying to drive their existing podcast app user base to Youtube Music instead. It remains to be seen whether that will work - but here Google shows a lacking ability to monetise on of the fastest growing userbases of the decade - podcast listeners.
- There are still actual bugs in the Google Ads interface. Whether it’s slow loading speed or fully incorrect data - all this still happens in the core product that earns Google more than half their revenue.
- The transition from Universal Analytics to GA4 was a disaster, and Google created a large space for competing products to step up and eat market share.
- Google has a deep execution problem across product lines.
Google today stands on the shoulders of giants. Giants like Android, Gmail, Search, Gsuite, Youtube, GDN.
It’s failing to build the infrastructure for future Google generations to stand on.
It’s poised to have the core business of search slashed brutally in size by the rise of LLMs and similar products. Largely funded by Microsoft, no less.
Perhaps Google has a secret stashed away.
Perhaps the Google brand is strong enough to retain the behaviour of “googling” even while they deploy inferior AI products into their UX.
Failing either of those two, I think the Google outlook is terrible. We’ll know more in a few years!