What Business is Google In?

Looking back from where we are, and recalling the vigorous debates analysts and observers once had about "whether Google wants to be a phone company," it now appears the original question has no simple, unambiguous answer.

Does Google want to be a regulated common carrier providing communication services to consumers and businesses? No. Does Google want to be a provider of Web-enabled IP telephony services? Yes. That's what Google Voice does.

Does Google want to be a "Skype-like" provider of international calling services? Perhaps it was not originally thinking it wanted to do so, but Google Voice now supports for-fee global calling from whatever handsets Google Voice users wish to employ.

Does Google want to be a facilities-based wireless services provider? No, but it has an investment stake in Clearwire. Does Google want to be a mobile phone manufacturer? No, but it is increasingly partnering with others, including hardware and service provider partners, to create new applications and business practices within the mobile industry, planning to introduce the "Nexus One," a Google-branded open and unlocked GSM phone, in 2010.

The point is that there is no unambiguous answer to any of these questions. Google slowly has been adding new roles in the communication ecosystem, but primarily to increase its core business model of indexing information and creating advertising revenue streams around the ways people use information.

To "answer" the decades-old question about whether an "ad-supported" telephony model can be created, again we are left with an ambiguous answer. The consumer voice apps Google provides are partially supported by end user fees, while the business-focused "Google Apps" productivity suite primarily is supported by user fees.

It remains unclear whether any sustainable "telephony services" business model can be 100-percent ad supported. But it seems likely such an effort can be partially ad supported, just as cable TV service provider evenues are partially ad supported.

So here's the next question: Will Google Voice, still in private beta, be configured as a small business service, much as Google Apps comes in both a consumer version and an enhanced business version? Michael Arrington at TechCrunch thinks that will happen.

"From what we've heard, Google is very seriously planning to add a version of the Google Voice product to its Apps suite of applications for businesses," says Arrington.

So far it sounds as though the service will be most applicable to the very-small business setting, as the likely deployment will feature a single inbound line and then mapped extensions that will redirect calls to a home business line, mobile or VoIP device.

The key here is management of the single trunk line. To keep the single trunk line available, Google Voice would have to connect an inbound call to the virtual extension, creating a direct connection between the caller number and the virtual extension, and then release the trunk line.

The same thing would have to be done for outbound calls, allowing the Gooble Voice virtual number to do the outbound dialing, setting up the connection between two physical phone devices, and then releasing the Google Voice trunk.

If that isn't done, there will be danger of high "line is busy" blocking.

Still, one would guess that the inevitable question--does Google want to be a provider of communications services to small business--likewise will wind up being only ambiguously answerable. The only unambiguous observation is that Google now is well entrenched in the mobile, communications, application, advertising, IP communications spaces.

It is part of the ecosystem, but uncomfortably (for other ecosystem partners) unconfined to one role in the full ecosystem. Perhaps a better way of phrasing the question is: "Does Google want to make itself the center of a new ecosystem?". There's likely a single answer to that question.


Google started out as a search engine, and have since expanded, through product development and acquisitions, to include services in every link of the information chain, says Jay Neeley, a Web strategy consultant. So one way of looking at how Google might see itself is that it operates in core parts of the information ecosystem.

As part of its activities in the "Internal Information Creation" segment, Google hosts or enables the creation of content.
But Google also is heavily involved in the "External Information Creation" segment, indexing information it has not created.

In the "Information Usage" segment, Google facilitates ways to share, edit, talk about, use, remix, and do all kinds of other things with information. In the "Information Reception" segment, Google offers a variety of ways for users to access and keep track of information.

"Information Aggregation" is another part of what Google does, culling information by popularity or usefulness and
making that information available in other ways, such as in Google Maps. "Information Analysis" is part of the analytics portion of the information business.

It just so happens that to extend its information business, Google might want to do lots of other things that impinge on other existing businesses in the communications, entertainment, applications, software, media and hardware spaces.