The Rise & Rise of Google: Part 1 - Paradigm Shift

When I was a child with a passion for all things computing, Microsoft was just starting on its road to global domination. By the time I'd been through university and started my career, they had pretty much completed it, and I couldn't conceive their stranglehold ever being relaxed unless it was by governmental intervention; and even anticompetitive lawsuits have failed to check Microsoft's domination and exploitation of most computing paradigms. Personally, I wasn't too fussed! Microsoft's software was good, I enjoyed using it, and the fact that everyone else used it made my life very much easier!

However, people do so like to have choice; and those that did would hail Linux distributors' and Apple's attempts to take on Microsoft. Unfortunately, as history shows, their efforts were largely in vain, as in real terms the collective market share of these products was rarely ever into double figures and Microsoft's position remained unassailable. Unless something fundamental changed, the status quo was unlikely to alter.

But something fundamental did change: the way that people used computers; and the harbinger of this paradigm shift was something called the Internet. Suddenly, people using computers were not "chained" to the information and applications based solely on their desktop, or at best on their network. They could access applications and information located anywhere in the world.

Mired by their Microsoft-centric myopia, and probably more than a little seduced by tales of their own infallibility, Microsoft was slow to realise the Internet's potency. Even when it did, it failed to properly understand and exploit it. Almost overnight, Microsoft appeared to transform from being lithe and innovative to gauche and inept. It looked unable to comprehend a marketplace that it didn't control, couldn't ride roughshod over and couldn't buy its way to dominance.

In short, Microsoft simply didn't understand the rules; they had changed, and it wasn't setting them anymore!
New marketplaces with new rules are fertile breeding grounds for new players to prosper. Unencumbered and unconstrained by years of "traditional" thinking and with nothing to protect, new players are often best placed to challenge the status quo, and to understand how to best exploit new markets. Suddenly the unthinkable became thinkable.

So it was, in this brave new world, that most of us came to hear of Google for the first time. Back then, it was merely a search engine, and by no means the first; however, unlike its predecessors, Google was really good! Google's success was to properly solve the first big problem with the Internet: cataloguing the completely ad hoc and anarchic collection of information that had grown to become the World Wide Web, thereby converting it into a very powerful and immediately accessible body of information.

Put another way, Google were the first to manage to harvest the aggregated "noise" of the World Wide Web, distilling it into a tool that every second of every day enables the human race to abstract the information it requires to solve thousands of problems across the world.

The effect of this achievement on the World is profound. For example, have you every stopped to consider how the rate of human advancement has increased since having such instant access to such a vast database of knowledge? If not then I suggest you start simply by thinking how much more quickly and efficiently you solve problems since Google became available.

Unsurprisingly, buoyed up by bringing order to the sum of man's intellectual capital, Google felt well placed to take on some additional World problems! As a result, from its inception as a "mere" search engine, we have all subsequently grown used to Google as a cartographer (Google Maps), an advertiser (Google AdWords) and a software company (Google Chrome & Google Docs), to name but a few.

Google has undoubtedly been spectacularly effective at monetising its businesses, and at providing tools that it is hard to imagine doing without. However, the breadth of its influence, coupled with its success and lack of any real competitors has caused many to question the extent of Google's power and dominance, in what is today arguably the most important field of human endeavour.

Could it be that Google is not only threatening Microsoft's dominance of computing, but also its position as the bête noire of technology firms? In the next of this series of articles (The Rise & Rise of Google: Ubiquity not Scarcity) I will dig a little deeper and shed some light on just how influential Google has become and where it is likely to go in the future.