| Facebook was viewed as a threat to Google for two primary reasons: - Facebook had access to tremendous amounts of personal information, and it was assumed they could leverage this data to improve ads and search and beat Google at their own game. - Everyone sat at their desktop computer staring at Facebook for hours on end, making it valuable ad real estate. Again, this cut into Google's core business. So is Uber a comparable headache for Google? I don't see Uber as being a threat to their core business (their business is ads, not search; search just happens to be their best channel for ad delivery). Arguably it provides valuable information to improve their ad targeting, but it seems like a huge investment for relatively little payout in that regard. My guess is that it's a natural extension of their work on self-driving cars. People have identified how Uber would be natural fit for self-driving cars. But I doubt Google wants to be reliant on a third-party company with reputation problems to introduce these cars to the world. That would introduce too many variables. So they're cutting out the middle man and doing it themselves, at least at first. So how does this impact advertising? A nation-wide or global fleet of automated, networked cars would obviously produce a glut of valuable information (arguably their Uber-clone would too, but an automated solution could be taken to another scale). But really, I think the self-driving car is a disruptive enough technology that it could be completely orthogonal to their core business and still worth pursuing. On a side note, can we agree yet that Facebook is quickly fading into irrelevance? It seems to have two important properties left (neither of which they developed): WhatsApp and Instagram. WhatsApp gives Facebook as much value as AIM gave AOL in its later years (which is to say, not enough to justify the company's size and market capitalization). Instagram took Facebook's best use case (looking at your friends' photos) and stripped away everything that made the experience suck: ads and Farmville (in other words, Facebook's business model). I like what they're doing with React though. |
This is a great point that may not be getting enough play in this conversation. You could easily imagine Larry being nervous that Uber won't not be evil (pardon the double negative). I know people can probably point to examples where Google has lost their way on the 'Don't Be Evil' front, but I'm sure it's still a big part of their decision-making process. I use Uber and love the experience, but you have to think there's some truth to the horrible reputation they're earning themselves; Uber doesn't scream 'Don't Be Evil' to me.