Reading through Gary Marshall's article (It's 2008. There's no Google. What now?) makes you wonder just how you'd cope without the search colossus. Especially if you're increasingly entrusting a lot of your life and/or business to it, as I am.
Google dominates the search market in the UK. But take Google out of the picture and we'd still have MSN Search, Yahoo! and numerous others – we'd still be able to find 'stuff' on the web. A world without Google isn't a world without the Internet.
Yahoo! There's no Google
So if Gmail didn't exist, I'd probably still be using Microsoft's Hotmail (now Windows Live Mail) or Yahoo! Mail. Without Google Docs, I'd have given Zoho a spin, another online office suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation tool.
Other Google products have been built around smart acquisitions. Upstartle's Writely application became the foundation for Google Docs, while Google acquired Keyhole Inc. to get its hands on the technology that would eventually power Google Earth.
And while Google didn't invent keyword-based online advertising, it has arguably developed the best system to take advantage of it. Crucially, online advertising has enabled all sorts of online businesses, websites and blogs to spring up and scratch out a living.
In a life without Google, we'd still have an iPlayer, YouTube and Facebook. We'd still have an iTunes, Hulu and Flickr. We wouldn't miss Google Talk or Google Video and, with IE8, Firefox 3, Flock and Opera, you could argue that we don't need Google's new Chrome browser.
But without the constant competition from Google, would anyone have pushed the boundaries of search? Would we have effortless image searches? News searches? Local searches? Would Yahoo! and Microsoft have rushed to give us gigabytes of free email storage?
I guess we'll never know.
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stareclips.com
September 5th 2008
2. I'd have to disagree with you on one point. You stated that without Google, we'd still have YouTube. If you look into YouTube's past, however, you would see that they were on the verge of buckling under their own weight. As traffic continued to climb, they were scrambling to find funding.
When Google acquired them, one of the primary reasons they agreed was because without Google's infrastructure, YouTube would no longer be able to be maintained.
Chances are, without Google, some company such as Time Warner would have tried acquiring them... but would not have been able to keep up with the infrastructure needs. Then, they would have tried monetizing it by flooding it with full video commercials before and during and after videos, which would have killed the community aspect of YouTube. In time, it would have died off like AOL has been doing for years.
I believe Google was the only organization that could have maintained YouTube and would have stuck with it this long without trying to over-monetize it.
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blueg
September 5th 2008
1. I think...I don't care.
Then the Google button in my head gets pressed and I remember I love Google and all it stands for. It's like a learned uncle to me.
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