Google, which prides itself on helping people navigate the Internet, is facing a tangled Web as it weaves its own future.
While more profitable than ever — with nearly US$30 billion in revenue last year — Google is under pressure from new rivals such as Facebook and Twitter for the attention of Web surfers, advertising dollars and engineering talent.
In naming co-founder Larry Page, 37, to be chief executive, analysts said Google was seeking to return to its startup roots and ensure its place amid a constantly evolving Internet landscape.
Outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt, 55, was brought in to run Google in 2001 when it was battling other, now defunct, search engines, while Page and fellow co-founder Sergey Brin were just a few years removed from Stanford University.
Schmidt, who has jokingly referred to himself as the “adult supervision” at Google, is widely credited with helping build the company into the technology titan it is today alongside the likes of Apple and Microsoft.
And while Schmidt is expected to remain an influential voice at Google as executive chairman, the Mountain View, California-based company is turning to Page to stay ahead of its competitors over the next decade.
BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis said Google experienced tremendous growth under Schmidt, becoming a search and advertising powerhouse, but the company also arguably experienced a number of missteps and missed opportunities.
“A case can also be made that the company has not built any new material revenue streams, was late to building for the mobile market, has no effective social solutions, overbuilt its headcount and placed itself in the crosshairs of government regulators,” Gillis said.
Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of technology blog SearchEngineLand.com, said Google’s biggest challenges now were to “prove that they’ve got their Mojo back and that nobody needs to fear them.”
Sullivan said “social networking in particular is seen as hot and Google is seen as a company that ought to be doing something there.”
At the same time, he said, Google’s critics “neglect the fact that they actually have successful products and quite a range of them.”
The other major issue for Google is “they are engendering a lot of fear in various places: people wondering about privacy, whether they’re favoring themselves ... governments investigating them for anti-trust claims,” Sullivan said.
Wedbush Securities social media analyst Lou Kerner dismissed claims Google did not have a social strategy and said the company was well-placed in the booming mobile telephone market with its Android mobile operating system.
“Facebook is the world’s biggest social network and Google is not going to come up with another social network,” he said. “But they already have a massive social presence.”
“YouTube is the third-biggest Web site in the world and massively social ... E-mail is still the primary social communication media and Google is the fastest growing e-mail provider in the world,” Kerner said. “And they’ve got the largest blogging platform in the world so they are already a massive player in social.”
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