How Not To Blog

The only way Google will survive is to rebrand itself as a content-sharing portal.

But, alas, it doesn't want to be a "portal" at all. It doesn't want to tie any of its many services together in a coherent way like Yahoo is doing (especially with 360). It's doing everything portal-like while at the same time screaming that it's not a portal, doesn't want to be a portal, and isn't competing with portals.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Schmidt said Google would not seek to turn its website into a broader internet portal, a move that would take it into more direct competition with Microsoft and Yahoo.

How stupid is that? We're not talking AOL, here. We're talking about a new generation of content-sharing portals, a la Yahoo 360 on steroids. I'm sure Google knows that the average user spends less than 3 minutes on Google. For Yahoo, it's more than 5 times that.

Rule #1 at Google should be "Don't Be Stupid", not "Don't Be Evil". Lately they seem to be having trouble with both.

Google is already a portal. Their unwillingness to communicate what they already are to consumers (yes, consumers) will be their downfall. Google's Picasa, desktop search, GMail, Hello, Blogger, Keyhole, Adsense, Adwords, web search, news, mobile services, local search, discussion groups, freelance expert answers, catalog directory, their soon-to-be-released browser, and a whole lot more will show up at the bottom of Google searches if they don't follow in the direction that Yahoo is going.

Google needs to actually spend real money marketing themselves and communicating to you and me. Google's old strategies will not continue to work indefinitely. No one is talking about Picasa, Google's Flickr-like offering. People are talking excitedly about Flickr itself.

Advertising accounts for near 98% of Google's revenues. This would scare the fuck out of any reasonably intelligent company. Google should be ashamed to focus on search so much.

Why?

Not just because MSN and Yahoo are re-developing their search algorithms, but also because RSS feeds and other aggregators will kill Google searches (and revenue). Yahoo knows this and is embracing RSS and I'm sure will popularize it even more and begin to use it in ways that Google can't imagine. Google search will continue to remain as relevant as it is today, but RSS and other types of feeds (that effectively bypass search) are even more relevant. The only way to handle this is to become a content-sharing portal.

Where's the ?Add to My Google? button? Wait... where is My Google?

Yahoo is forcing a reluctant Google into being a portal but, alas, only Yahoo sees the big picture.

Now that Google is a publicly-owned company, it is mandated to grow, grow, grow. I guess it has no interest in remaining competitive. Google needs to diversify its revenue base, for one. But first it needs to get its head out of the sandbox.