Imagining the Google Future
Top experts help us plot four scenarios that show where the company's geniuses may be leading it—and, perhaps, all of us. — (Business 2.0) - We all know that the company Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded a mere eight years ago is one of the new century's most cunning enterprises.
Context & Ripple Effects
Eight years after Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google, the company has graduated from product coverage to futures journalism: Business 2.0 convened experts to plot four scenarios for where it leads. The backdrop is Google's late-2005 move on Madison Avenue — a striking turn for founders who, as Stanford graduate students, expressed skepticism toward advertising in the very paper that became Google.
The speculation has concrete anchors rather than pure conjecture: Larry Page delivered a keynote at CES in early January 2006, and the two co-founders invested in a Stanford friend's independent film in December 2005, their first visible step into Hollywood.
First-order effects
- The scenario exercise centers Google's expansion beyond search — already visible in its push to dominate Madison Avenue — as the lens through which analysts and advertisers price the company's next moves.
- Page's CES keynote and the founders' film investment put media and entertainment squarely inside Google's stated perimeter, not just in futurists' imaginations.
Second-order effects
- Agencies and media incumbents now have to decide whether Google is a channel partner or a competitor, a choice sharpened by the irony that its founders once doubted advertising altogether.
- A Google-backed entry into film points toward bundling content with its distribution reach, forcing traditional media gatekeepers to respond to a rival with no legacy cost structure.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern of absorbing adjacent markets holds, the structural question stops being which business Google enters and becomes whether one firm can sit at the infrastructure layer of both advertising and media — exactly the kind of scope that historically draws regulator attention.
The trend: Scenario-building around Google marks the moment a search company starts being treated as the default infrastructure for the web's advertising and media future.