Could Google Be Jumping the Shark?
In practical terms, no, of course not. Google is still the best, fastest, most useful, and most verbed search engine out there. But it's also been the recipient of glowing press coverage for nearly as long as it has been around. And you have to imagine that the good media fortune will eventually run out. (The press? Mercurial? You think?)
See, Google was easy to love, because it had a good story. Two grad-school classmates develop build better mousetrap. Better mousetrap beats the big players, but founders stay grounded. Funky office! Abnormally equitable IPO! Clever holiday designs on the homepage! Lots of cool, well-designed new products!
But recently there have been a few less-good storylines. Disrespecting authors' copyrights! And now, the worst: Stealing what remains of newspapers' classifieds business, slicing off much of their revenue!
There's nothing wrong, of course, with seeing a business opening — like classifieds — and ruthlessly going after it. But, alas, you don't get to be George Bailey anymore once you're also a little bit Mr. Potter. Especially in the press, while you're busy knocking out the financial foundation of their business.
So is the coverage of Google going to change? Probably not, at least not yet. The flagship product's just too damned useful. But if it does, we'll say this: David Carr's column today (Google Base "could be a fine thing for consumers, but for newspapers, which owe about a third of their revenues to classified advertising, it could be more a spike to the heart than just another nail in the coffin") was the inflection — tipping, even — point.
We're just saying.
