Category Archives: Google

Big picture, Google

On Google’s purpose

Horace Dediu at Asymco has been pondering recently the purpose behind Google – its motivating force. This is something I’ve been thinking about too in my research, and I thought I’d put a few thoughts down by way of a response, or a contribution to his thought process.

I think Google’s purpose is very closely aligned to the founders’ personal objectives to a degree that is relatively rare in public companies. More often than not, founders get pushed aside as the need for “adult supervision” outweighs the desire to indulge them, especially in the run-up to an IPO. But even when they stay, it’s often because they’ve mastered traditional business management techniques (often with lots of help) and therefore somewhat lost sight of their own purposes or at least subjugated them to the needs of a public company to satisfy shareholders. Steve Jobs arguably tried this for a long time and eventually found himself forced out, only returning to Apple when he had learned how to reconcile the two.

But at Google today, it’s really Larry and Sergey calling the shots, with Larry once again at the helm after that period of adult supervision under Schmidt. But even under Schmidt, Larry and Sergey called the shots to a great extent. I’ll draw on several excerpts from Steven Levy’s In the Plex book here, starting with one about the dynamic between Schmidt and the founders:

His anecdotes about disagreements with Sergey and Larry followed a consistent storyline: Schmidt expresses a tradition-bound preconception. The young men who, technically at least, report to him, reject the idea and demand that Google pursue an audacious, seemingly absurd alternative. The punch line? “And of course they were right,” Schmidt would say. (p.81, Kindle Edition) Continue reading →

Adoption, Android, Android versions, data, Google

Thoughts on Google’s Android version charts

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Google regularly updates the data it provides to developers on Android versions in use, screen sizes and screen densities, and I’ve been diving into this data today for a report I’m working on. In the next few days, Google will update the data again and there will no doubt be the usual flurry of blog posts and news items about Android fragmentation. But I wanted to share some thoughts that occurred to me as I looked through this data that go beyond the usual rhetoric. Some of these are original, some of them likely aren’t.

Firstly, a fairly predictable pattern has emerged in the adoption of the versions of Android, as follows (and as illustrated by the chart below) 1:

Android Major Version Distribution Continue reading →

Notes:

  1. It’s worth noting that the methodology Google uses for all these numbers changed in April 2013, and now reflects only devices actively using the Google Play store, and not all devices as previously. From what I can tell, it hasn’t made an enormous difference, but has slightly increased the representation of newer versions while decreasing or eliminating the representation of older versions. ↩
Ads, Advertising, Google, Instagram

Instagram’s advertising problem

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Companies participating in the consumer technology market have to generate revenue in one or a combination of these four ways:

  • Charging users for hardware
  • Charging users for services
  • Charging users for software
  • Charging advertisers for eyeballs.

If you don’t make hardware, then you’re limited to the other three options. The vast majority of companies that fall into that category are opting for the last option, because it lowers the barriers to entry for users, but perhaps also because it allows those seeking funding to avoid the difficult question of revenue generation until they have an audience.

The assumption seems to be that, as long as you have eyeballs, you can find a way to turn those into advertising dollars. And that’s true to a certain extent, but the ability of different consumer services companies to make money from advertising depends varies very greatly, in a way that is rarely talked about. This has come up a bit recently in the context of Spotify, because the ephemerality of the content is supposedly poorly suited to advertising. But there’s a much bigger problem that affects not just Snapchat but also many others in the current crop of messaging and photo sharing companies, which is that they know almost nothing about their users that’s relevant to advertisers. Continue reading →