Google is an interesting company. It has strong competitive advantage, is basically a monopoly on the search engine market, with the word “Google” that became a verb. Google is soo dominant in its position (Bing is a joke, Firefox is basically financed by Google), is the default search engine on both android, that they own, and ios. The search engine is the centre of Google's eco-system, (Drive, G-mail, Google account, to a smaller extent YouTUube), that make competing with them almost impossible. Even in a “bad” year like 2022, made over 60bln in net profits. Nothing to worry about right?
I think chatgpt can be a treat for Google's business model. It is developing very fast, is infinately scalable and is backed by Microsoft. Of course Google is working on it's AI technology, and I am sure what they developed is impressive, I have no doubt that they can become a juggernout in the chatbot/AI space.
However we should not confuse CAN with WILL. Embracing this technology would require Google to revolutionise its business model, and find new ways of monetizing its data. Back in the days, Yahoo lost everything for the same reason. They could have acquired Google, a new powerful search engine that delivers search results quickly (for only 1 mln dollars), but they decided to dismiss the better more efficinet solution, that they had no finacial incentive to adopt. They instead decided to make people spend more time on their website where they can be bombarded by ads. Sounds familiar, right?
Yahoo still exists, but is nothing like before. Google used to say, “competition is always one click away”. Maybe they are right. What do you think, will they be the next Yahoo?
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