Is Google losing the game?

Since the start in 1998 to this date Google has came a long way becoming a giant in the whole IT industry. This is not just because they are the most visited website but they also were ahead of the rest in innovation. But nowadays Google seems to be losing it's grip on the business with the rest of the players in the game. Google's main revenue comes from advertising, when they started advertising they only had very few competition, when the competition keeps on growing, google obviously lost a portion it's advertising revenue to the competition. Google managed to keep up with the competition by improving their advertising quality and even changing their search algorithms, but when they take the action they were a little late.

So is this the only reason why Google is falling behind? Was it really Google's fault? Well... not really, just think of it in this way Google is making the most revenue through advertising, even to this date it has not changed. Which means they want people to use Google to search, they know this this is why they are spending a lot of effort creating better algorithms, and why they implemented the image search and even voice search. But now if you need to buy a book would you search Google for it or directly go to Amazon and use the site search there? Or if you want to purchase something you may log into either Amazon or eBay and do your search there. So this is clearly not Google's fault, the preferance of the people and the way people use the internet has changed. What can Google do about this? Simple answer is Google should think about some other innovative ways to inline with their services, like Artificial Intelligence, wait what? isn't they already into this? Yes they are but the question is are they still ahead of the others? When Amazon introduce Echo, Google home was still on the developing table, when Google introduce Pixel, Apple was way ahead of it's hardware for mobile phones. I am not saying Google is really bad at the hardware, No.. but Google has to improve and be innovative to keep up. Giving an example, Google is controlling the software for Android phones for many years. But with each version update, we’ve seen very few memorable upgrades. That’s primarily because Google’s past innovation has been very limited by external factors it couldn’t control, well... hardware to be frank. Just imaging what Google could do if they can be better at hardware. Google assistant is really good at speech recognition, it has the access to the entire google search engine without any limitation, it can translate languages, find places and even to do a proper video search. Can anyone beat that? No.. so it's the innovation that Google is missing. Here are two of the major milestones which I think is important to discuss.

Taking over YouTube
Google took over YouTube in 2006 and it's been more than 10 years since 2006 but Google is still struggling to make YouTube a profitable business even though it has billions of users browsing videos over the site. If fact YouTube being the 2nd largest search engine, advertising on YouTube is still not became a very successful way of generating money because most of the videos on YouTube are just "Junk". However if Google could master YouTube and make it a successful revenue model, then this will be a major breakthrough for them in business.

Google +
Google came up with Google + mainly to compete with the social media platforms who were already ahead of Google. Users who already had google accounts were forced to have a profile with Google + and Google gave SEO boosts to those who are with Google + but still, people didn't like using it. Businesses and individuals still use Google + but not as much as other social media channels like Facebook, Twitter.

On the surface, it appears that Google is falling behind its competitors in a number of different areas, but we must remember, Google isn’t always the first on many services but they nailed it later on. It wasn’t the first search engine; but it was the search engine that was successful than the rest. It didn’t offer the first email service; it offered the one that worked the best. Similarly, even though Google is behind some of its competitors in these areas, the competition may drive them to create better products even if those products are a little late to enter the market. Fingers crossed for that...

Drop a comment on this if you have any agreement or even disagreement on this topic.