Make the troops work together

The competition among consumer technology companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook is centered around one scarce resource: customers’ time. The higher the time you keep people on your services the more successful you are. Logically, the more of them you have the bigger the chance that people will spend more time with you. This is why Google over the years has been launching so many different services: search engine, email, maps, OS, browser, TV, YouTube, social network, calendars etc.

Source: velcom Belarus

The strategy for Google until now was “locate the troops”. Now the strategy shifts to “make the troops work together”.  Under this strategy Google announced last week a crucial element of its implementation – changes in privacy policy that should allow deployment of personal information across existing services. Let’s take Google+ and Google Search. Two very different services that when combined together deliver a radical change in users experience. Thus a picture or comment you did on Google+ comes up when you do a Google search. That personalization should bring more consumer attention to Google by taking it away from services and competitors such a Twitter (when you do a search Google results come first, and then Twitter).

Google pushing ahead is perhaps not seen favorably by rivals such as Facebook and Twitter. But more advertising revenues for Google, better user experiences and more customer attention leaves also less power to operators and less engaged customers to operator owned/backed consumer cloud services.