Google's Achilles Heel
Today was the 9th birthday of Google. 9 years after it took the world by storm, Google seems invincible. They have the best people, they make the best products, they are set to dominate every market they enter. Yet, despite its apparent strength, Google is more vulnerable than ever.
With all the wonderful products they make, Google's revenue-stream is dominated by one component: advertisement. Google shows us ads next to our searches, our e-mails, and in the corners of the web sites we visit. Companies pay Google to show their ads, we endure seeing them, in exchange for using Google's services for free. It's a positive feedback loop, where the more we get accustomed to using the services, the higher Google's income becomes, the better products they can afford to make, and so on.
Yet this system has a fatal weakness. If ads are displayed as a distinct element on the page (like all ads are today), they can also be removed from the page. Compared to the difficulty of spam filtering, identifying ads is relatively easy technically. Since the filtering is done locally, in the browser, there will always be a way of doing it without the server finding it out.
Let's recognize it, ads are an annoyance. Despite people saying the contrary, they are never useful or informative. If I want to find out about something, I can do it through search. That's why the Firefox extension, Ad Block Plus is so popular. Until recently, it seemed to be kept under the radar by the Mozilla people. This is no surprise, since they rely on Google for their revenue, after each search people make from the 'google search' box in Firefox.
The shocking news came when statistics were released about the most used Firefox extensions, according to number of update requests and Facebook-favorites. Surprise: in both categories Ad Block Plus is the absolute winner. With extensions like Ad Block or others, you can browse the web and use Google services without ever seeing any of their ads. I won't get into the debate whether this is ethical, and whether it will be beneficial on the long run or not. Fact is, ad blocking extensions are spreading like wildfire, and Google must have felt the effect by now.
Someone might say, Firefox users are not the target audience of Google ads anyway. As Firefox usage hovers around 10% globally, Google can manage without them. Tech-savvy people, early adopters, hackers, young people probably rarely click ads anyway. Not to mention free software enthusiasts, who are probably the least likely to buy stuff through unwanted ads. Though I don't have any relevant statistics, I would guess these groups are much more probable to use Firefox than casual users, computer illiterate people, or grandma and grandpa.
Actually at this point, probably the only people who still use Explorer are those who don't know how to install programs, or what 'program' means. These people make up about three quarters of the general population, and happily click ads, which they can barely distinguish from the rest of the page. So Google's revenue is safe after all. Yes, until the day when Microsoft introduces a reliable ad-blocker built into Explorer, and makes it activated by default. Of course they can't filter out just Google's ads, or they would face the biggest lawsuit in history. They would have to give up on their own advertisement business as well, which is probably close in volume to the measurement error anyway.
All signs show they are not going to do this. Since they can't compete with Google on search and ads, they will continue to sell the pre-installed IExplorer, and help Google to more ad-revenue. Until one day, either being pissed off that they are not the No_1 software company anymore, or seeing as their market share is eaten away by Firefox, Mac and Linux they will make this desperate move.