January 10, 2006
@ 03:23 PM
Comments [2]
http://www.google.com/ig/dell

I found out about http://www.google.com/ig/dell via John Batelle's blog last night. It looks like Google now has a personalized home page for users of Dell computers.

During the Web 2.0 conference, Sergey Brin commented that "Google innovates with technology not with business". I don't know about that. The AdSense/AdWords market is business genius and the fact that they snagged the AOL deal from more experienced companies like Microsoft shows that behind the mask of technical naivette is a company with strong business sense.

If I was competing with a company that produced the dominant operating system and Web browser used to access my service, I'd figure ways to disintermediate them. Perhaps by making deals with OEMs so that all the defaults for online services such as search which ships on PCs point to my services. Maybe I could incentivize them to do this if there is the promise of recurring revenue by giving them a cut of ad revenue from searches performed on said portal pages.

Of course, this may not be what http://www.google.com/ig/dell is for, but if it isn't I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't eventually become the case.


 

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Tuesday, 10 January 2006 22:05:07 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Isn't making deals with OEMs that got Microsoft into a lot of legal trouble? Do you think Google would want to tread down the same way?
Leo Nelson
Tuesday, 17 January 2006 14:59:21 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
This is why I enjoy reading Dare's blog. He is not afraid to acknowledge when someone does something brilliant, even if it may have been something that the company for which he works should have done first. I think the Google page for Dell owners is brilliant. Think about it: the #1 computer seller users are exposed to the #1 search engine by default whenever they do a search. MS tried to do this in a crude way by forcing the MSN Network on the Win95 desktop. Google's way is more subtle and more importantly is less likely to make the DoJ get on their case :) It's a win-win for Google and Dell. Great!
Jimoh Alabi
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