The way our economy works now, things come in neat little packages - whether it’s the inventory of a store or the contents of a newspaper. But in the Web 2.0 economy, those little packages will go the way of the dodo.
Instead, information and products - along with targeted advertising - will be organized by what a consumer is looking for. RSS feeds and search engines are a big part of that change - with Google leading the charge. In fact, as a recent New York Times article reported, Google has businesses from Wal-Mart to The Wall Street Journal working hard to stay ahead of the Web giant’s footprints.
The article looks at Google’s possible future impact on retail:
Google has no interest in stocking and selling merchandise. Its potential impact is more subtle, yet still significant. Every store is a collection of goods, some items more profitable than others. But the less-profitable items may bring people into stores where they also buy the high-margin offerings - one shelf, in effect, subsidizes another.
Search engines, combines with other technologies have the potential to drive comparison shopping down to the shelf-by-shelf level. Cellphone makers, for example, are looking at the concept of a “shopping phone” with a camera that can read product bar codes. The phone could connect to database and search services, and aided by satellite technology, reveal that the flat-screen TV model in front of you is $200 cheaper at a store five miles away.
On telecommunications:
[Google] has made a number of moves that grabbed the attention of industry executives. It has been buying fiber-optic cable capacity in the United States and has invested in a company delivering high speed Internet access over power lines. And it is participating in an experiment to provide free wireless Internet access in San Francisco.
That has led to speculation that the company wants to build a national free GoogleNet, paid for mostly by advertising.
And on newspapers:
Google News allows a reader or an advertiser to pick and choose…splitting the articles from the ads. And Google’s ads, tucked to the side of its search engine results are often a more efficient sales generator than print ads.
‘Google represents a challenge to newspapers to be sure,’ said Gary B. Pruitt, chief executive of the McClatchy Company, a chain of 12 newspapers including The Star Tribune in Minneapolis and The News & Observer in Raleigh, NC. ‘Google is attacking the advertising base of newspapers.’
It’s not that businesses are worried Google will put them into Chapter 11. But they do realize that the Web 2.0 economy means change - and they don’t want to get stuck in a “Who Moved My Cheese?” phenomenon that leaves them behind.
But the Times is almost negligent in its omission of strategic entry into the blogosphere as a way for companies to adapt to Web 2.0. Blogs are as big a potential revolution for business as usual in public relations and marketing as the Google effect is for the traditional business models of companies like Target and Verizon.
And the comparative Google juice of a blog to a static html page with the same content makes the blogosphere ripe for inclusion in an article about how Google is shaking up the economy.
They must have just run out of room.
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