In 1998, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University students then, founded Google, only 147 million people had access to the Internet. And that was just 3.6 per cent of the world’s population. Evidently, to start a service that, by default, excluded almost all the people in the world and catered to a micro-minority, which was some sort of a laughing stock and objects of obscure human curiosity wherever they existed, was a big leap of faith.
But Page and Brin strongly and rather blindly believed in the power of technology and the World Wide Web to transform the way humans lived, worked and interacted. Today, as Google has turned 20, more than four billion people have access to the Web, and the company has over the past two decades introduced a series of innovative products and services, most which have left a deep stamp on their one billion users and societies.
It all started with search
As folklore has it, it all started with the search. BackRub, as Google was initially called, focused only on basic search on the web. By today’s standards, the algorithm appeared rather rudimentary and tricky, but had an organic charm, as it was trying to do something that was clearly futuristic, and the coders and computer scientists were, like the first railroad workers, duty-bound to make it as easy-to-use and mishap-free as possible. Still, it took Google some years and millions of hours of research to perfect the search algorithm.
In 2002, Google News was launched without much fanfare, considering how it has changed the way people consumed news and how the product has changed the very idea of news publishing. News aggregation, until then, was an idea whose time was never there. But soon it helped build a new industry, offering a new lease of life to content generators, while opening a Pandora’s box for legacy media companies which accuse Google of exploiting their (free) content to make a killing. That’s now, but back then, it was a godsend for news buffs. It literally opened a new window to worlds unknown and unheard of.
A new lease of life
Still, it was the arrival of Gmail in 2004, long six years after the birth of Google, that offered the search company a new lease of life. Gmail arrived on an April Fool’s Day and, hence, many people took it for a fun-play from the geeky enterprise because many of the services it offered, including the 1 GB storage, looked unbelievable at that point in time.
Biggies such as Yahoo and Microsoft’s Hotmail were not offering much then, and soon, Gmail won the game hands down. Simple, innovative design, coupled with elegant layouts and composing techniques, did it for Google. In fact, Gmail’s popularity and ubiquitousness immensely helped Google easily market other products from its stable. Today, Gmail has more than 1.2 billion monthly active users and the product, with all the embedded services such as the Google Drive, contributes a lion’s share to the company’s revenues. Google Maps came in 2005. Hardly anyone, even those who believed in the prowess of Google, believed then the ability of such a product to become popular, even in the US. The service soon evolved from plain vanilla maps to a comprehensive direction-powerhouse by integrating information on hotels to monuments to everything that people wanted to experience while on road. The arrival of taxi aggregators like Uber made Google Maps an everyday affair.
A game-changer
Interestingly, two of the most popular ‘Google’ products of the day — Android and YouTube — were not created by Team Google. Android was bought way back in 2005 for some $50 million, but was redesigned and launched in 2008. YouTube was bought for a whopping $1.65 billion in 2006, beating bids from Microsoft, Viacom and Yahoo. YouTube became the next big game-changer for Google, which redefined the idea of video consumption across the globe.
The Chrome browser was a dud initially. Still, in parts it is. But users got used to it grudgingly at times as Google embedded it on Android OS phones. That worked well for the browser on the mobile front. It didn’t take off on laptops and elsewhere. Such was the case with the Nexus phones, which didn’t become a sustainable brand for Google despite the initial hoopla it generated, prompting many experts think ‘hardware’ may not be Google’s area of expertise.
But by now, Google has left its imprint on almost all human walks of life, from mails to maps to marketing. Cloud services to self-driving cars to experiments in virtual reality to artificial intelligence, the company continues to surprise pundits as well as the public.
Undoubtedly, a lot has changed for Google and parent Alphabet from, say, 2002, when the then mighty Yahoo tried to buy it out for a whopping $3 billion which, with a lot of struggle, Google resisted. Ironically, just last year an emaciated Yahoo went to Verizon for nearly $5 billion. Alphabet currently enjoys a market cap of more than $840 billion. Indeed, Google may have gone a long way from the days when Search was its core competency. But, philosophically speaking, search remains the core ideology of the tech giant as it continues its quest for newer products and services that may not be appealing to a majority of the people on the planet.