One thing I quite enjoy about watching large tech companies is their rather straightforward approach to problem solving. Having trouble breaking into a certain industry? Just reinvent the industry. Is one company causing you problems with their chokehold on the market? Invent their competition and push them out of the way. Consider how many industries Apple has essentially invented in the last decade. This is a very different approach from large corporations in other industries. GM, Ford, Honda, Chrysler, all the automakers, all expanded until they could expand no more, and then settled down to compete for incrementally larger slices of the existing market share. (Unless you're talking about Tesla, which is as much a tech company as a car company, and acts like it.)
Recently, I was discussing this with my brother in relation to the video game company Valve. Over the last decade, through the incremental growth and development of their Steam platform, Valve has managed to snap up something like 75% of the total PC video game distribution market. As a consumer, I will admit that I think the last time I bought a hard copy of a PC game was Halo 2; everything else I could desire is either on Steam or can be downloaded directly from the developer. And given the choice, I'll go with Steam. They have an extremely well-integrated social and stat-tracking front-end, and more to the point, they have a ridiculous economic engine in the form of TF2 Hats, Dota 2 cosmetic items, trading cards, and all the other games that provide market items to feed the growing Steam economy.
So Valve has grown, and continued growing and growing and growing until they hit a bottleneck. And that bottleneck is Microsoft. Their Windows OS has long been the sole destination of PC games; other operating systems had no games, so gamers didn't buy them, so developers didn't make games for those systems, etc. But Microsoft is clumsily trying to modernize itself for a post-PC market, and their latest OS, Windows 8, is designed largely to enable easy transitions between smartphones and tablets and computers. Which is fine and dandy for them (or will be if it manages to regain some of the market share they've lost - see Apple, above), but which is NOT necessarily optimal for computer games. Valve CEO Gabe Newell, in particular, has called Windows 8 "a catastrophe" and "a giant sadness." Microsofts efforts to move toward a more app-based computing system where everything goes through their designated storefront is explicitly contrary to Valve's goals and interests.
So what does Valve say? "Well, forget Windows; lets reinvent PC gaming somewhere else." Not only has Valve made a big push to increase video game offerings on existing Linux machines, but their upcoming Steambox console/pc/streamingbox/thing is running on Linux. Valve isn't stupid, so their Steambox will still be able to run their existing Windows games, but if this thing takes off, the install base of Linux gamers will increase enormously, AND there probably will be less system overhead involved in running Steambox games on the native Linux than on a mirrored Windows emulator.
See what they just did there? They expanded until another company got in their way, and they rerouted around them. (Which, if it works, will NOT make it easier for Microsoft to protect their ever-dwindling PC revenue stream.) That's simply an approach to problem-solving that the major players in other industries don't seem to share.
So why do I think Google will take over the world someday? Because Google's approach to growth makes Valve look positively dowdy. Just think about all the major initiatives in the last few years that Google has used to circumvent or redirect industries that were in their way:
- Google Chrome: Not only does having a homebrew browser make it much easier to integrate Google's growing stable of products and things, and not only does it offer the base for the Chromebook OS, but by releasing Chrome, Google completely changed the direction of browser development. Google got tired of users being limited by the speeds available in IE and Firefox, so they created their own browser and optimized and marketed it for speed. Lo and behold, within a few update cycles, IE and Firefox were also optimizing their browsers for speed, meaning that across the board, Google could now program upon assumptions that users had the browser speed they wanted them to have.
- Google Plus: Sure, it hasn't taken off, but it hasn't exactly tanked, either; it just hovers over there. But at least one of Google's goals for Plus were accomplished before it even left beta: as Google's new 'circles' mechanic for fine-grained control over post privacy picked up press attention, Facebook announced that they too were adding options for users to have more specific control over what posts were visible to what users.
- Google Hangouts: My brother's theory is that this happened after some Google exec got ticked about Skype dropping a call during a corporate meeting. While it was buggy and had stability issues at first (or at least it did for me), these days Hangouts provides greater functionality than Skype with none of the paywalls, not just for individual users, but for celebrities to hold public hangouts on whatever topics they desire (of which this is just one example).
- Google Fiber: Google wanted users to have superfast internet in order (presumably) to enable future Google projects. No existing internet providers had any incentive to provide such ridiculous internet speeds; their quite reasonable objective was to provide the cheapest possible product for existing applications while charging the highest possible cost. So, Google says "screw it" and invents Google Fiber, which has completely sidestepped the existing industry standards and already is inspiring copycat services from other companies (and which has also, against all odds, made Kansas City something of a tech hub).
And this isn't even counting the numerous examples of Google inserting itself into other industries by the simple expedient of buying the existing majority stakeholders (see YouTube). So Google has a well-established record of reshaping other industries to their liking by the simple expedient of taking them over, and they do this every time they run into a bottleneck for growth.
So who's to say they stop growing?
Keep in mind that Google recently and unilaterally declared war on death. Sure, it's a moonshot, but Google is good at moonshots, so let's pretend for a moment that Google's new Calico operation actually gets somewhere. Suddenly, 10 years or 15 years down the line, Google is once again going to see their growth constrained by other industry players: drug companies, insurance companies, possibly the hospital industry, the FDA. So what happens then? Does Google decide for the first time in its life to hunker down and play the game by the rules laid out by the established players? Or do they say "fine, be that way" and use their enormously deep pockets to start selling Google-branded health insurance at rates that established players wouldn't dream of matching? Do they establish their own anti-aging clinics to administer Calico-based therapies? Do they buy out Healthcare.gov (in whatever form it exists in 10 years) and remake it in their image? Do they have any compelling reason not to?
And those are just potential repercussions from Calico; consider what happens when Chromebooks become big enough that Google starts eyeing the video game market (Google and Valve: my OTP), or Google gets tired of airlines fussing about Google devices on planes and starts their own damn airline. Even Google has limits, and none of these are going to happen tomorrow, but I see no compelling reason to assume that Google will decide to let anyone else impede their growth anytime soon either.
So there's my reasoning: Google will eventually take over the world. I personally have no real problems with this; they seem more qualified to rule it than any other contenders. Will it happen soon? No, but don't feel complacent. If there's anything we should know about Google by now, it's that nobody can anticipate where they're going to go next.
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