The Google Bear
Forrester research's chief executive, George F. Colony, spoke recently to the Times. Check out tomorrows paper for his take on RFID and Google.Q:Let's talk about Google. You came out against it to some degree last year, citing competition from Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. But Google has done well. Were you wrong?Finally, someone to dampen the Google flame. We like Google, but Google's economic moat isn't what you think--new search algorithms are probably being cooked right now in a University laboratory somewhere. Google better expand their product line and do so quick.
A: This is how I saw it: that Google has three major challenges in front of it. No. 1 is competition. They have a lot of money, a lot of power and they want Google's business, so probably No. 1 for Google is competition. Problem 2 for Google is what I call "switching costs." There are no switching costs to move from one search engine to another. Before Google, I used AltaVista. I changed to Google in about 27 seconds. I will leave Google in about 27 seconds. The third problem is, Google is a fantastic technology for a page-oriented, HTML-based Internet, which is what we have today. The problem is, we're not going to stay in a page-oriented world.
Q. That assumes that Google wouldn't be able to adapt. And we're still going to need to search through all the information out there.
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