What It Takes to Beat Google

The blogosphere dropped some serious hate on Scoble for stating that Techmeme, Facebook, and Mahalo would beat Google within four years. Scoble's argument centered on how Techmeme, Facebook, and Mahalo use different approaches to search, and those approaches are better than Google's approach. The haters disagreed.

I disagree with Scoble and agree with the haters. The larger point, though, is that beating Google is NOT a search issue. Instead, it's a branding issue and a capabilities issue.

Allow me to explain:

1. Google wins because people trust them -- not just with search, but with their lives. People trust Google for email, for RSS, for search, for videos, for advertising....for a lot (whether or not this trust is justified is a different story; the point is that people trust Google, at least relative to other options). Whoever is going to beat Google has to earn even more trust. Trying to earn trust by delivering search results is hard; you're now competing directly with Google at what they do best. You may not like Google, and you may think you can beat them, and you may be right. But competing with them directly at what they do best sure is making it tough on you.

2. Google wins because they can do everything. As we discussed in an article from our miniseries, Platform Strategies: The Game Plan for Web 2.0, capability building is the only sustainable edge. In other words, the fact that Google can make tons of killer apps -- search, Gmail, Google Reader, AdSense, even the potential GPhone -- is the real reason behind the company's success. Google's two foremost rivals, Yahoo! and Microsoft, cannot move nearly as fast as Google; they are not as good at building new capabilities.

And that's the key issue. Whoever beats Google is going to be even better at building new capabilities. This is a management issue -- not a search issue. And the management innovation that allows for superior capability building is going to be the real game changer -- the one that creates even more economic value than Google has created, and makes us forget about the awesomeness and seeming invincibility of Google (just like how Google has led us to forget about the awesomeness and seeming invincibility of Microsoft).

It's too early to say for sure, but from my perspective on the outside, it does not seem that Facebook, Mahalo, or Techmeme have the management system to build capabilities faster than Google. It's going to require something very different.

Originally Published on KidMercuryBlog

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