What is Google, These Days?

Sometimes there is no good way to describe a company except by long clumsy strings of words. How does one discriminate between service providers who own facilities from those who do not; who own different kinds or amounts of facilities; who operate in different customer segments. Worse, how does one describe companies whose business ambitions and scope defy simple explanation, or operate in multiple categories, some of which do not seem to have widely-understood names, yet?

In other cases, shorter tags can be used, but are imprecise. Gvien that all the growth in the cable TV business is in voice and data, plus small business and even, in some cases, in enterprise services, does calling them "cable" companies, referrring to their use of physical access media, or "cable TV" companies, referring to their legacy business, make sense?

Google causes us those sorts of problems. Journalists and bloggers often use shorthand such as "search giant." But Google already operates in more important segments and businesses than that. Now it's into browsers, cloud computing infrastructure, mobile phone operating systems, advertising placement systems, video, wikis, email, blogging, software as a service, messaging and other applications including collaboration. 

It's part media company, part advertising services provider, part software company, part computing utility. And to say it is a "software" company belies the customer segments and types of software it creates. If you are somebody who thinks the most-valuable asset is knowledge about what people are doing--right now--and what they are interested in, that's one way of describing what Google does, in its totality. It creates software for people to use at least partly to create knowledge about what they do, who they know and what they are doing now. 

That then creates the ad-based revenue streams that so far have been the foundation for its business model. So in a broad sense, Google creates software people really like to harvest the analytics and monetize that capability. But that's hard to capture in a simple adjective. Harder still is to figure out what Google is, so the search for an appropriate adjective can begin.