Google is my life

With the recent poll by Mashable finding that 70% of us prefer gmail to outlook (albeit a survey among an online  savvy crowd) I thought we should all take a moment to think about how much of our life Google is controlling – indeed, for many of us, it is our life. Now I’ve made decisions to choose Google products because they’re just so…. good. But is it right that they control so much of my life, both personal and professional?

When Google goes down.

Gmail has its fair share of outages. The usual outcry erupts on Twitter and we hopelessly wait and do nothing, while we pray that it comes back up. Why do I wait and do nothing? Because gmail is my pathway to pretty much everything in my working life (since I run a business – take it as a given that all my time is work time). It means that my email goes down, my google chat goes down, my calendar goes down and, worst of all, my documents go down. A sobering thought and a stark reminder that its complete lunacy that Google controls so much of our online lives.

Their command of the search market is clear. We’ve known that for a long time, we’ve accepted it and it’s not going to change any time soon. It probably never will. In November 2009 Google had a stronghold on nearly 72% of the U.S. search market and that figure is creeping up all the time, despite the odd threat from Bing, Wolfram Alpha etc.. In November 2008 they held 63.5% of the search market. For Google, the only way is up.

Search may be one thing, but Google is now staking it’s claim in other areas. A heavy advertising campaign has seen gmail gaining market attention and, as the Mashable survey shows, is outperforming Outlook in many areas. Google Chrome is now the 3rd most popular browser. Not bad for such a new product. With the increasing directory of Chrome addons, it won’t be long before Google starts beating Firefox. And beat the competition they will, because it comes back to my first point, that they are just too good at what they do. Google Earth and Google Maps has revolutionised the way we consume information online and I’ll bet that 90% of the time, people don’t even realise that what they’re looking at is a Google product, reinvented in the next new mashup. To see just how many areas Google is expanding into, check out their product list (it’s long).

Up next, clearly, is Apple. I for one am certainly not prepared for Google to be my phone as well and I wonder how many people share that sentiment. Google, for me, is starting to tip past the point of being just an internet giant, into being quite scary. As discussed in a recent Diggnation episode – Google can go into pretty much any market they want, take it over and not even have to make any money from it.

They can do it because they can. Is this okay? Probably not. Will it change? Probably not. For Google – the sky’s the limit. A photo competition that ran in 2006 to find out what the world would look like if it was owned by Google is actually creeping up on us. There is more than one scenario on there that has come into fruition. Google is a unique phenomenon. We should be scared, but fascinated too.

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