BusinessWeek's latest cover story asks Is Google Too Powerful? and gives readers the chance to vote online.
Google has become incredibly rich and powerful. As the story says: "If you can believe it, Google's $144 billion market value tops that of Time Warner, Viacom, CBS, ad agency giant Publicis Groupe, and the New York Times Co combined."
Google's phenomenal ad machine, in short, has the potential to vaporize the profits of any industry that traffics in bits and bytes and to shift the economics to the advantage of Google, its users, and its cadre of partners. "It's Google's world," shrugs Chris Tolles, vice-president of marketing at Topix Inc., which makes money from running Google ads on its news aggregation site. "We just live in it."
The story reckons Google is trying not to seem aloof and arrogant:
In its most recent earnings conference call with analysts, Schmidt and other executives mentioned the words "partner" or "partnership" more than 50 times. It may be working to some degree. Some TV networks, such as CBS, and other media outlets have found ways to work with Google. It has also sealed deals with Dell Inc to install Google software on computers and even with sometime rival eBay Inc to run ads on the online marketplace.
This looks like a balancing factor, but I can't see that Google has any partnerships at all. Doing a deal with Dell is just business, and Dell would be just as happy to take someone else's money for a toobar. Same with eBay. There's no relationship involved. This is like claiming I have a relationship with Sainsbury's Local because I shop there: true, but not significant in any real sense.
