way to go google!!

Way to go Google, their introduction to the S&P 500 is fuckin' awesome! That’s bona fida legitimacy right there, I'm almost surprised, and at the same time I find myself likewise awe stricken as I was in a similar fashion upon hearing that Microsoft had been added to the Dow Jones industry average.

As someone who has seen this industry mature from its fledging beginning through its boom and bust cycle, to see this come to fruition fills my heart with gladness. Google my hats are off to you! Does anyone still see Google as the newcomer? As some one who still misses the InfoSeek search engine and first glimpsed the web through yahoo utilizing a Lynx browser, I still have this impression of Google as a recent upstart, lollz I realize they have been around for 5+ years now, but it's all recent history for me. When Google first hit the scene I tried it a buncha times and wasn't impressed with the results that I received, at the time I preferred alltheweb.com. But Google rose to prominence in the past 4 years, as most competing pure search engines have been either marginalized or turned into shadows of their former selves, as I imagine that Disney is kicking themselves for transforming the Infoseek portal into a glorified go.com outlet, when had they pursued the growth strategy employed by Google they could be sitting on a potential gold mine.

Even yahoo has sort of folded in upon itself; failing to innovate has proved fatal. Does yahoo still publish a print version of the magazine that it seemed mid 1999 that they were dead set on hanging their fortunes on? No, I think it's gone for good. Yahoo has been perusing other growth strategies recently, but it seems that these new ventures have come only in response to market leader’s innovation, they have surrendered the innovation flag to Google and others, perhaps in the hope an opportunity will in turn present itself at another time. It seems like these cycles of innovation permeate the marketplace these days, an entity only leads the pack for as long as they are able to create fresh innovation that will inspire the minds of others, and that is the currency traded in the marketplace.

So in turn even Google will give in to another fresh group of innovators prepared to create something new and exciting that will inspire people’s imagination. Or perhaps not, return to the example of Microsoft, they easily could have been overtaken by others whom innovated faster. Microsoft never truly led the market in terms of innovation after 1995; through their acquisition strategy they were able to effectively harness the technology of others to achieve their long term growth strategy. What landscape would we be surveying now had yahoo, given the opportunity, bought out a fledging Google back in 1999? Think on that my children……