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Like IBM in the 1940s and Microsoft in the 1980s, Google is still on the ascent. “It may take 10-plus years for Google’s star to waver,” notes Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn. Other top tech executives also give Google about a decade before it faces a transformative moment.
How might that moment arrive? “The Web is doubling in power every two years,” explains Rowan Gibson, co-author of Innovation to the Core. So in 10 years, the Web will be 32 times as powerful as it is now. Then, a Google-style search engine—delivering thousands of results that users must sort—will seem as archaic as card catalogs.
A brainier Web is coming, and the next generation of companies will anticipate your needs. Early this year, much like Gates 14 years ago, Google Senior Vice President of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg wrote a lengthy memo foretelling a day when a perfect search engine would comprehend all of the world’s information and the meaning behind every user query, and deliver to users not a dump truck full of search results, but The Answer.
If that’s the future, Google figures it will get there in lots of tiny steps rather than major, bet-the-company shifts. Google famously flings a lot of half-cooked spaghetti against the wall (who the heck uses Knol?) to find a few advances that really stick (like Google Earth). The approach “may give us a bit of an edge and let us be more reactive,” research chief Norvig says. He notes that Google’s executives have all read The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen’s best seller explaining these generational shifts. “We say, ‘Gee, that’s compelling, and maybe it will happen to us—or maybe we will be the company that displaces ourselves.’”
And yet, that almost never happens. History says Google will struggle as technology shifts. But good luck figuring out what company might catch the next wave and give Google fits. In 1995, Gates worried about existing companies such as Novell and the start-up Netscape Communications. Neither wound up a serious rival. Google was three years from being born. Fear what you can’t see, not what you can.
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