Google is buying us…

Few days ago I was discussing with my partner Noah how the website is coming. I mentioned in a previous post that he is not what you can call a hacker or a very computer savvy person. So while talking about our idea again, he surprised me with a very good question: “So what prevents other people from doing what we are doing, and why should WE be the ones to succeed?” I totally did not expect such a good question from him so it took me a few seconds to run scenarios through my head. Eventually I mumbled something very reasonable that sounded like that: “Well, to our knowledge, we are the first to be doing such a weird and useful idea, so we have the advantage of time. The other thing that plays only after we launch this product is that sometimes some site become very popular and its difficult to take them over because they have solid amount of dedicated users (or maybe not). It’s a little bit like being youtube – nothing technologically very challenging that can’t be done, and also they weren’t the first ones to come up with this either. But they had a lot of users, and even Google couldn’t compete, so they bought them”Once I said that, something very interesting formed in my mind. I saw the online business from a totally different perspective. There are two reasons for acquisitions usually: great technology that takes time to be developed and a great user base. What I never realized is that they bought have the same purpose and it is to own people, pieces of their attention. Internet is like a second world, that has no rules yet and is free for grabs. This is the beauty of it. NO RULES. So the game is the following – you hook up people on your service and you are their owner. You can now be considered landlord. What you can do is use those people (their attention) to make money or capture more free users that have no roots to anything yet. Who is really damn good at this game? Yes, the googles. They hooked up people on their search, made billions, hooked up people on the maps, will make more billions, and what do they do with this money? They buy people that they use to make more money and buy more people… I am saying this because most of the websites can be replicated by Google for a maximum of few weeks. So essentially what happens when there is an acquisition is that G doesn’t really buy a company or technology, they buy YOU, they buy ME and my mom (well, my mom got bought by Ebay when they acquired Skype). But who gets the money? It’s not the end users.

The bright side: there’s still plenty for everyone. There are plenty of freely roaming browsing users that either don’t know about G or are interested in things that G doesn’t provide yet. So do go and capture land. After all its free – all you have to do is go and claim it.