Hvassing.com

Google is moving forward with a speed rarely seen before. Their never-ending ability to conjure up successful web-services that no one even knew they needed is their strength. Having a successful advertising program making profit in the background helps, especially when having more than 5 000 employees in what might seem more as a playground than an office. Soon Google will be dominating the web, even more than they do now, and to a large extent decide what's hot or not.

A recent article from BBC News (1^st of February)¹ talks about Google having vast amounts of dark fibre

in recent years it has built up a huge reserve of "dark fibre" - unused network capacity available to transport vast volumes of data across the internet.

-- Guto Harri, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4816848.stm

Google has more money, more human resources and are apparently more willing than any other business in the world to change the way people thing about the world wide web. They are playing a big part in just about anything that happens on the internet. Speculations were that they were developing their own web browser as well, however these rumour's are still a no-show.

They have changed the game -- several times -- with great success and chances are that they will continue that trend. Google Labs is evidence enough of their will to evolve and change the game in the future as well.

However, with Google's appetite for organic growth and new inventions they are likely to push others out of the game. Small companies currently competing with Google have only two ways to go if they want to survive and that is to offer better and more personalised customer support. Google is the Goliath of the web, with some of the characteristics of David.

On average, "Google is buying a new business every week"¹, this is the small companies second option. However, this requires an idea that's genuinely good and with the right to live. The latter one is left for Google to decide.

What I fear is that in the future there'll be only a handful of huge companies that control's the web and what the users are exposed to. In much the same way as Google Search works; if your company's site is not on the first few pages, or not even in Google's database at all, you do not exist on the web at all.

¹Harri, Guto. "Google Charm makes its debut" BBC News. 1 Feb 2006 BBC, 27 Mar 2006 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/business/4816848.stm>