Kineo Australia

What if Google failed?

As widely reported, Google mail went down on the 24th of February resulting in worldwide unavailability of user’s accounts and inboxes. Affecting both business and consumer accounts.

For most people, this probably falls into the ‘mildly annoying’ category.

However being just a blip, it is an interesting preview of how ingrained and how (overly) reliant we have become on the “search giant” for so many areas relating to our corporate and consumer lives.

Imagine for a second if you will, the implications of the unthinkable – what would happen if Google “went down” permanently in either a technical or commercial sense. Particularly focus on this possibility as a sudden and unexpected event as is often the case with corporate failures.

I can almost hear the chorus of laughter now “it will never happen”.. but the same could be said about Lehman brothers – a long standing seemingly indestructible iconic economic juggernaut that was allowed to fail.

Let’s examine the fallout of suddenly yanking the Google carpet from underneath the feet of society.. the implications are huge.

Advertising – Where is my brand without Google?

“We aren’t on Google anymore? Oh. Um. Where are we then?”

How much reliance does the average business have on Google for traffic and revenue?
Where do I get my customers from? How does someone find my site if they don’t know my URL?

The fact is most branded search traffic comes from a search engine.

What about unbranded search then. (that is – search engine traffic unrelated to your company name). It is not unusual for an average advertiser to derive a non trivial amount of customers from Google.

What if search engine traffic suddenly disappeared over night?

There is a reasonable argument that Yahoo or MSN might take up the slack. Maybe.

The fact of the matter is, if customers can’t find you. You don’t exist.

Loss of Gmail - where is my life/business?

“How much of my life is stored in my inbox?”

For some, losing all your emails is the online equivalent of your house burning down.
The average long term Gmail user will have hundreds of megabytes, if not gigabytes (in my case I have 2Gb) of emails, phone numbers, photos, usernames, passwords, addresses, videos and assorted random (but possibly very important) attachments  – stored in Gmail. Can we live without this suddenly? ouch.

How much of my business is stored in Google email/apps?

“Ah. We have a backup right?”

Probably not if you are using Gmail (Google apps) for business.

“Oh. Google keeps a backup right?” well…

Loss of analytics - where’s my website?

“How are/were we doing?”

Google analytics is wildly popular. Any site with a reasonable level of traffic has inevitably implemented it… even at a most basic level of tracking page views and referrals.
More sophisticated ecommerce sites have implemented it for revenue tracking and analysis.
How much historical information regarding acquisition, repeat traffic, conversion analysis, content reporting, keywords and so forth is held in trust within Google analytics.

How would you cope if this disappeared suddenly?

And the economy in general?

“ouch”

What would be the knock on effect financially of the failure of Google?

In a word. Huge.

In nominal terms Google’s revenue is approximately one-third of the now defunct Lehman brothers, however revenue per se does not tell the whole story. The disruption to the Digital economy as a whole would be huge. One would argue (comfortably) that the follow on disruptive effect to the macro economy would be massive.

The truth is businesses and consumers have become so incredibly reliant (and increasingly more reliant) on the online space as a pivotal part of our day to day lives.

The reality is that Google touches (and increasingly owns) just about every part of online, directly or indirectly.

How then, should online business seek to minimise exposure and risk when it comes to online strategy and operations?