Googleopoly
As many of you smart asses know, Google took its name from the googol, a hugely huge number (1 followed by 100 zeroes in fact) that was coined by the 9-year old nephew of mathematician geek, Edward Kasner. Little Billy Kasner (or whatever the nephew was called) didn’t make much coin from it, not like Larry and Sergey did from their version.
Yesterday’s announcement that Google is buying online advertising agency DoubleClick for $3.1billion has competitors up in arms that Google is becoming a monolopy when it comes to online advertising. We call it a Googleopoly, but that’s just us (and it probably isn’t original anyway).
Microsoft Corp and others believes Google will now have an unassailable advantage over competitors in the online advertising market. It dominates the search engine advertising market and, with the purchase of DoubleClick, will dominate the online display advertising market too. Boo hoo.
Of course Mighty Mike, the subject of many anti-trust complanits itself, might be just trying to deflect attention from its own alleged monoploistic practices. The reality is that, while Google will find synergies between the two types of online advertising, they are different beasts and so unlikely to provide an unfair advantage over competitors.
Other than the unfairness that innovation brings, that is. What is easy to forget is that Google got big, not because it used unfair tactics to grow, but because it built a better mousetrap. And it doesn’t own the market on mousetraps.
