| In the short term, I think Google founders as the people buying online ads from them become increasingly aware that the real value of online ads is far far lower than what people are paying at the moment. As the ad and research industries catch up to the web and figure out real metrics for these things, people will not keep paying the prices that prop up Google's cash cow. At some point in the next 5-10 years, I think the bottom drops out of that market and Google gets caught flat-footed. Same goes for Facebook, incidentally. At the same time the ad market is bottoming out for Google, I expect something like Duck-Duck-Go to hit them on the search side of things in a big way. The result of this 1-2 punch is that 10 years from now, Google is about where Yahoo! was before Marissa Mayer took over, and where it is a hundred years from now depends on what direction they go from there. The key for both Google and Facebook is when someone cracks the code on doing something useful with all the data they are collecting. To me, this isn't a technology problem; it's a science problem. Classical statistics doesn't do well at this scale. Collect enough data, and you can find evidence for any correlation you might happen to search for. That doesn't mean it's real. We need real scientific advances in the way that we prepare, ingest, test, and interpret data at this scale, and we are literally at the infant stages of imagining how that might work. If Google hangs on through the hard times ahead, they are well-positioned to lead the way in that scientific advancement. But they will have to get out of the mindset that some new technology innovation can solve this. It can't. Personally, I think we're 25-30 years away from being able to deal effectively with data at Google's scale. While it's possible that Google could still be around at that time, collecting data that way will no longer be a novelty that only people like Google and Facebook can do. Everyone will have that capability. Mountains of data treasure will be the commodity that processing power is today. So, yeah, 10 years from now, Google is throwing out press releases that sound like recycled PR material from Yahoo or Microsoft in 2008, and most people are looking at them thinking: "How did that happen?" That's my 2 cents. edited for typos. |