Google Wears a Bullseye At Web 2.0
SAN FRANCISCO — The second day of the Web 2.0 Summit featured some of the Internet's heaviest hitters talking strategy, new products and how to compete with search king Google, one of several sponsors of the event. — "There is immense opportunity …
Context & Ripple Effects
A year after the corpus framed the open questions for Web 2.0 going into 2006, the second day of the 2006 Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco has crystallized around one of them: how anyone competes with Google — which sits on the sponsor list even as speakers cast it as the target. The confirmed record from the week shows why the bullseye fits: Google is set to take over YouTube despite its own video service already being sued for copyright infringement, is pushing its reach toward Madison Avenue advertisers, and announced a partnership with research firm comScore days before the Summit opened.
Google's response to the hostility on stage is notable: CEO remarks commit to making user data portable so customers can export it to competing services if dissatisfied — a defensive answer to being cast as the lock-in incumbent. Even an operational stumble landed in the same news cycle, when staffer error emailed the Kama Sutra mass-mailing worm to roughly 50,000 members of its Google Video Blog discussion list.
First-order effects
- Rivals presenting at the Summit are now openly building competitive strategy around displacing Google, while Google simultaneously funds the venue — partner and target in the same room.
- Google's data portability pledge directly lowers switching costs for users weighing competing services, a concession aimed at blunting the 'too powerful' narrative forming around it.
Second-order effects
- The pending YouTube takeover stacks more copyrighted clips onto a video business already facing infringement suits, raising litigation pressure on the combined property just as Google courts rights-sensitive media partners.
- Google's Madison Avenue expansion and comScore partnership move it toward ad-industry measurement and buying intermediaries, forcing agencies and measurement firms to decide between working with the search giant or defending their role against it.
Third-order effects
- If every Web 2.0 strategy session is organized around answering one sponsor, the industry's structure tilts toward Google as the default platform gatekeeper — with portability pledges and litigation risk becoming the standard checks applied to whoever holds that position.
The trend: The Web 2.0 wave is consolidating attention and ad dollars around a single search intermediary, turning 'competing with Google' into the organizing question of the industry.