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Some Statistics on search market:

Ø Multi Billion + 35% annual growth rate is a big market – BIG opportunity

Ø Today’s major players of the street fight (229 Billion market cap)

– Google (13 Billion revenue 170 Billion market cap)

– Yahoo (33 billion market cap)

– Microsoft (other business segment)

– Amazon (other business segment)

 

What is at stake culturally and socially in the search wars?

Ø During most 90’s search had no money in it, suddenly every one seem to be interested - Why?

Ø The first round of search wars was own by two young Stanford graduates – how did it happen?

Ø Unusual Company formed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page – 1998; rest is history

Ø Currently revenue is around $13 Billion

Technology gap between Google and other companies is narrowing down

– Lead in the index

– Features like news or product search

 

We see 10 major cultural implications of the growth in popularity of social software, or more loosely, the fact that more and more of your social interactions are moving online.

 

Implications for Individuals:

1. Basic computer skills really matter. . . and fortunately the next generation is much more technologically skilled than the current generation. It is harder and harder for blue-collar professionals, let alone white-collar professionals, to do their job without basic computer literacy.
   
   
2. Communication skills really matter. . . but they’re not improving as fast as we would like. Half of all companies take writing into account when making promotion decisions. A poorly-thought-through email (or blog post) can get you fired. And yet, one third of employees in the nation’s blue-chip companies write poorly, and businesses are spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training.
   
   
3. Your professional competence will be more and more visible. As a result, the successful will get more successful, and the unsuccessful will have fewer second chances. Potential clients and recruiters are finding it easier to evaluate your visibility and knowledge in your industry, by reviewing your blog or using a biography analysis tool like ZoomInfo.
   
   
4. Your personal life will also be more and more visible. Potential employers and business partners will correlate your name with photos, perhaps even using technologies like Riya to identify you in photos that someone else took. This is excellent motivation to be careful as to what activities you engage in.
   
   
5. People will become more effective and more thoughtful in building their personal networks. Job applicants are already showing off the number of people they’re linked to on LinkedIn, and whom they’re linked to. (”Hire me and I’ll get you in the door at _ _ _ _ _.”) Who do you link to on your blog? Who are the people that Visible Path shows that you have emailed? The answers impact your professional success.

Implications for businesses:

 

1. Businesses can’t control the dialogue, but business will attempt to “own the frame,” to quote Lee Bryant. Although businesses cannot control what consumers say about their products, at the very least they can make the conversation more visible.
   
   
2. The Pro-Am Revolution: more amateurs are pursuing their part-time activities to a very high, even professional standard. One of the multiple factors driving this widely-discussed trend is the ease of connecting with and learning from other serious amateurs online. Companies will learn to leverage their employees’ part-time activities.
   
   
3. Companies will ship more often and fix more often. Have you ever wondered why the great majority of Google’s services are still in “beta?” One of the major reasons is that Google has found that they benefit by gathering reams of free online user feedback and incorporating it into their services before they go live with a finished product. They use the online network of the entire Google user community as their extended Quality Assurance team.
   
   
4. The prosumer is always right. Inferior products are much more visible, and consumers are proactive about publicizing that fact. For example, some bloggers recently publicized how Kryptonite locks could be opened with a bic pen, and lockpicker Barry Wels showed how you can open a Kensington laptop lock with a toilet paper tube. Kryptonite lost an enormous amount of money because they made the mistake of shipping an inferior product.
   
   
5. More and more value will rest in the long tail, defined loosely by Jason Foster as “the realization that the sum of many small markets is worth as much, if not more, than a few large markets.” Businesses will figure out ways to make money by providing access to content in the long tail (e.g., Amazon), or by helping people to generate content in the long tail (e.g., Blogger).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 1:09 pm and is filed under SEO | . You can follow responses to this entry through the Comments RSS Feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.