Search strategist AJ Kohn has written one of the clearest explanations of Google's motivations—without ascribing evil! On his blog, Blind Five Year Old (the random sounding name actually refers to "a specific search engine optimization (SEO) philosophy – to treat search engines like they are blind five year olds"), Kohn explains the company's strategy in its simplest terms, "Get people to use the Internet more."
Duh! And I thought it had something to do with being driven in a driverless car to the singularity!
But according to Kohn's version of Google's (not so) evil plan, since everything we do online generates revenue for the company, all it has to do is "improve speed and accessibility to the Internet.… to shorten the distance between any activity and the Internet."
Kohn works systematically through 13 of Google's major initiatives and shows how this principle is at work in all of them. What is interesting about this approach is that it's easy to imagine that this is the way that many at the company conceive of what they are doing—making a faster, more enjoyable user experience—the side benefit of which is increased revenue.
If you've read any of my stories about Adrian Bejan and his Constructal Theory of how design improves flow in systems, the analogies to Google should be clear. From its initial search product, the company has continually innovated to improve the quality of search results (preventing multiple searches), return those results in fewer milliseconds and then auto-complete as you type to shave off still more. In typical Google fashion, it is attacking the engineering problem at each level between the user and the internet with products and services that change the physics of our engagement with data.
More than building market share, the goal of Google's Chrome has been about speed, as Kohn puts it, "Chrome is about reducing the friction of browsing the Internet." And what better way to reduce that friction than to make the web itself faster? Enter SPDY (no, not the Marvel superhero), which is an experimental protocol designed to reduce the latency of web pages. Think of spdy:// as a faster version of the http:// that you see at the beginning of web addresses. In fact, SPDY may become the basis for HTTP 2.0.
Kohn doesn't mention it, but Google has a whole initiative for developers called "Make the Web Faster," that includes SPDY, WebP (a new image compression format) as well as a host of services and practices that developers can use to build faster websites: the PageSpeed tool, Public DNS, Hosted Libraries, as well as Protocols, Standards, and Performance Best Practices. These tools have the potential to let savvy companies make their own products faster by following Google's lead.
Perhaps the most ambitious way that Google is making the experience of the internet faster is its ambitious Fiber program that it has rolled out in the Kansas City area. For a one-time fee of $300, customers can get free internet at acceptable current speeds (5MB down, 1 MB up) for a guarantee of seven years. The real action happens at $70 a month for gigabit internet and $120 a month for gigabit internet ("a connection speed 100 times faster than today’s broadband," according to the website) plus about 200 TV channels. Google TV has not been a game-changer, and The TV offerings of the Fiber program are far from being a cable killer, yet, but Google is betting that transcendent internet speeds will trump the raw channel count for many users.
Fiber is a pilot program that would be monumentally expensive to roll out nationally, but it shows the scale of Google's ambitions to shorten the distance between users and the internet (and, not incidentally, Google's own services.)
On the mobile front, Google has bets both on its Android platform and the new Firefox OS, assuring an Apple-beating global share of users consuming its services on their devices. And its purchase of Motorola Mobility is rumored to yield an advanced "X Phone," with "long battery life, wireless charging, and an unbreakable case" as soon as May of this year.
And more and more of these Google-connected devices will run the company's Siri-killing "Google Now," that uses contextual information to anticipate your every need. And Kohn writes, "it’s no mystery that predictive search is also about stimulating more Internet activity."
Google has also been experimenting with WiFi in an effort to make it easier for all of those devices to be connected all of the time. Google provides free WiFi in its home turf in Mountain View, and now in New York's trendy Chelsea neighborhood, as well. Google is investiogating how to turn the newly released white space spectrum into a kind of "super Wi-Fi," by taking advantage of its longer wavelength to increase the reach and penetration of local wireless networks. Google also appears to be testing some sort of a super-dense LTE network in another attempt to create faster connections in more places.
Google Drive and Chromebook are also free or inexpensive products that put users just a browser tab away from the internet, constantly. Similarly, the company is pushing its Google+ social network into all of its other products as a way of capturing more contextual data to make all of its other services work better and be more indispensable for its users.
The next step for Google is the world of ubiquitous computing with products like the soon-to-be released Google Glass. Even the self-driving Google cars have the side benefit of allowing constant (non-crash inducing) internet usage during the daily commute. And, as Kohn points out, commuting is less then 20% of the driving done in this country, so "a self driving car unlocks a vast amount of time that could be spent on the Internet."
All of these efforts, from the micro to the macro scale, are about creating a world where, in Kohn's words, the "friction to using the Internet would be nearly zero." In a world with this kind of physics, Google has an unparalleled advantage over other tech companies. And a big part of that advantage is that Google's well-being as a company is aligned, for the most part, with the needs and desires of its users. They make it faster, we use it more. They make it more useful, we use it even more. And the move to installing fiber and manufacturing its own hardware mean that the company is diversifying its business model to include more direct payments from users and not be wholly dependent on advertising revenues to fund all of this infrastructure. In a funny way, getting its users to pay for its services is a great way to assure that their interests are not superseded by those of Google's advertising customers. Sounds like a (not-so-evil) plan.
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