Ten years ago, I sat next to a filing cabinet of press releases, notes, presentations, and financial documents. My crappy Compaq 386 notebook chugged away on my desk. And someone down the hall—I think it might have been Will Wade of EE Times—told me to check this new site out. So I did. Damn.
I personally have always been on the lookout for pieces of technology that change the way we live. The Atari 2600. The mobile phone. The notebook PC. TiVo/ReplayTV. The consumer GPS.
Google wasn't one of those revolutionary technologies because it provided a search engine. Google changed the game because it did search so well. At the time, Yahoo! was doing just fine as the hub of the Internet. But if the Internet was a galaxy, Google became the black hole at its center: all of its information was inevitably sucked in, and the traffic and attention generated a technical sort of gravity, forcing its rivals to react, and, over time, orbit it.
As it turned out, AOL's and Yahoo!'s business models were partially wrong: paying for and owning content doesn't generate as much revenue as simply owning the first step of accessing it, and selling ads on it. And today, what's easier: to scroll down a list of bookmarks, or just type the site's name into a Google search box?
A digital video recorder allows individuals or families to watch TV on their schedule. A mobile phone connects people virtually anywhere they are. Google affected society by aggregating an overwhelmingly vast quantity of information in a single virtual space, with tangible cultural, economic, and legal effects.
I personally have always been on the lookout for pieces of technology that change the way we live. The Atari 2600. The mobile phone. The notebook PC. TiVo/ReplayTV. The consumer GPS.
Google wasn't one of those revolutionary technologies because it provided a search engine. Google changed the game because it did search so well. At the time, Yahoo! was doing just fine as the hub of the Internet. But if the Internet was a galaxy, Google became the black hole at its center: all of its information was inevitably sucked in, and the traffic and attention generated a technical sort of gravity, forcing its rivals to react, and, over time, orbit it.
As it turned out, AOL's and Yahoo!'s business models were partially wrong: paying for and owning content doesn't generate as much revenue as simply owning the first step of accessing it, and selling ads on it. And today, what's easier: to scroll down a list of bookmarks, or just type the site's name into a Google search box?
A digital video recorder allows individuals or families to watch TV on their schedule. A mobile phone connects people virtually anywhere they are. Google affected society by aggregating an overwhelmingly vast quantity of information in a single virtual space, with tangible cultural, economic, and legal effects.
