Sunday, March 27, 2005

How long will Google survive?

Hello,

Since my last post I didn't succeed in creating another failure. It seems that there is not much new in the web marketing failure market. Come on guys over there be some what more creative!

So while waiting for another opportunity to lose money on the web, I started thinking about Google. It must be some 5 years that Google is now ruling the search engine world. Google was fast, had an extreme wide coverage, easy to use. It was perfect, it was perfect then ... but now I'm here to predict the end of Google.

Why? Not because Google is bad, no, because the world has changed and Google is still on the old track. Google is a data mining system, what we need is an information mining system. Google is spending its time and money to develop nice to have but not so useful to have tools like Picasa, Google Desk Top: these tools might help to find your lost data in your lousy archive, but they will NOT help you to find information i.e. intelligent data. Also its adwords and adsense are under fire, and Google seems to have lost itself in so called creativity: read Google is desperately trying to find a way to earn money fast. In doing this Google forgets its mission, it forgets its strong points, its forgets that it's Google.

So I give Google about 18 months. If Google is not reconsidering its mission and goes for a radical change then a newbie with more performant technology will pop-up and will erase Google in no time. Come on guys take a sabbatical and think about what the internet (the new internet) needs and that's not the old fashioned Google.

Your dear friend and early Goolge lover,

Eric

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Adwords out of breath?

Hi there,

In my last post, I told you about starting up a new adwords campaign. Well I did, and it seems that I can make even the best system in town fail.

About 6 months ago, all my adwords campaigns resulted in some profit (read in a 200% ROI). Nowadays things have changed: the ROI has become negative, my ads don't generate money any more. Is this an early warning sign that Google has messed up? I don't know, but what I know for sure is that ad campaigns that used to be profitable, aren't any more.

I'm not going so far to blame Google, but it seems that in their never ending enthusiasm to try new things they tend to forget their customers. Take my word: this won't take long.

Google must bring stability again: advertisers are running away cause Goolge isn't delivering value for money any more; publishers are running away cause the profits have dropped. I'm not sure who will stay at Google. If I'm allowed to make a prediction: in the next 6 months a new web search engine will rule and Google will become like Altavista, Lycos, Excite, ... an old lady in Search Engine Town.

Hope that I'm wrong, fear to be right.

We'll see in 6 months from now, count down has started.

Eric