Can Wave Really Be The Big-Ticket Google Wants?
In Daniel Tenner’s blog post about Wave he explains that the bad press is all a matter of perspective and that Wave is most useful for corporate collaboration… I have to say he makes a very convincing case.
But, for Google, if that’s true it’s not great news.
Google’s “big play” is advertising revenue… they make huuuuge amounts of money via advertising – their enterprise offerings are tiny by comparison.
So, if Google Wave is mainly useful for enterprise clients they will have to charge for it (because those clients won’t allow adverts).
And, given Google’s past history I doubt they would charge Oracle level prices… so, in other words, just how big is the opportunity from Google’s perspective? How much money could they make compared to the ubiquity of their global advertising model?
I’m not saying Wave is bad or anything like that, just making an observation that, perhaps, Wave will simply end up being a trophy technology that Google are very proud of – but that represents a tiny percent of thier anual revenue.
What do you think?
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I’d say there would be a lot of SMEs that would stand to benefit from Wave who would also be quite relaxed about the adverts – so don’t discount all those eyeballs.
However I like to think that their primary motivation is just to make something cool that is also useful. Hell, that’s what my MO is and I don’t have the FU money that they have. I mean to say; what point is there having bucket loads of cash if you’re not going to spend it innovating wildly.
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Hi Justin,
Actually, Google already sells Oracle-priced things to big enterprises. They sell things called “Google boxes” that cost upwards of $100k and allow organisations to index their shared drives and the like. I don’t think it’s unthinkable for them to go and sell Wave Boxes to most of the large corporations out there… but we’ll see, I guess!
Also worth noting that Google can afford to play a very long term game – if Wave isn’t making serious money for the next 10 years, that’s ok for them – they make enough from advertising.