google base is for real.
Google tries lots of things. But that is what you can do with the web and if you have an ‘unbrand’ like those colored letter.
Much like Apple could sell a white square block of solid plastic Google get’s the attention of the web, not matter how odd the idea may be. Google Video for instance is not gonna go anywhere. DOA.
They just didn’t get the real dynamics of internet / moving images.
Froogle is kind of there, but not making much impact. I have not read anybody talking about it.
Google Base is, of course, a brilliant idea. Let the people bring the data directly to Google. They better make sure that it’s not full of spam like Blogspot. Oh, wait: Blogspot according to google is not full of spam, since they know what is spam and what isn’t. Technorati and Ice Rocket don’t. A good spam filter is these days a very very competitive instrument. Look at gmail: It’s spam filter works. Same with traditional search: search engine spam is huge. And google constantly change it’s engine to combat this. It sounds like that their steps get more severe: “jagger1” has shifted results for many semi-pro and pro SEOs all over the planet. Let’s see what the next weeks and the two more stages that Google will deliver in search will bring us.
Google Base could take some out of the market from eBay, Amazon and craigslist. It’s that one extra click that people don’t want to do.
They want to utter a couple of keystrokes and WANT the first result to be what they want. The internet is a mere extension to google it seems. With Google Base they just pulled the content a bit closer into their data centers. New products can go online instantly.
But the devil is in the details. The /concept/ of google video was brilliant. Or had some brilliant aspects. The actual implementation is stupid. It showed clearly that google does not understand what is going in this area.
I give them a better chance to understand the world of eBay / Amazon etc.
And then there are rumors about google money. If these things work out, then the current stock price of 346 (!) is not the highest we might see. The Market Cap of a couple of companies in Billion dollars:
General Electric 360
Microsoft 266
Wal-Mart 188
Google 96
Apple 46
Ford 16
General Motors 16
At some point this whole internet thing might tip:
Google’s might reaches a level of domination that the whole
rest will be just secondary. Much like the desktop OS market tipped into Microsofts direction at one point for 90% of the people.
Once you store all the email, classified ads, products, blogs, images, maps AND give the people decent access to it, who could possible compete?
There always was only one eBay. A second one had never a chance, since you want the access to the biggest collection. That and the brand keep Amazon and eBay in business.
Sadly only the leftovers might be interesting and worth pursuing in this brave new gworld. Leftovers not in respect of volume: Google practically invented the long tail of the internet. Leftovers in matters of content: Only the junk that Google can not associated with will be traded outside of the big G.
Orson Welles had the entire movie Studio to play with when he was young and made “Citizen Cane”. Brin and Page have the most dynamic thing on the planet to play with. And they don’t have to negociate with a studio. They own it.