Google is known for sneaking up on companies and creating a competing product that's better, faster, and easier to use. Here are some companies that were "Googlewhacked."
For a brief moment, there was a clear winner in the smartphone space: Apple's iPhone. With iOS, Apple brought features—and apps—to the mobile space that were unmatched in 2007. Then Google's Android OS landed in 2008. The open-source platform bred within phones from several device makers, including HTC, Samsung, and Motorola, resulting in market domination. While there are about 500,000 approved iOS apps in the App Store and about 200,000 in Google's Android Market, Nielsen says Android is the most popular mobile OS in the United States. Android holds about 38 percent of the market, and iOS has 27 percent.
Google Analytics v. Webtrends
Webtrends was the first among the major Web analytics providers to bring a product to market. Analytics has only gotten more important over time and thus more prevalent. Google Analytics has a natural advantage in that its business is (primarily) search and its Google Analytics offering is free. Webtrends does have one thing over it, though: real-time tracking. Google Analytics works at a delay of approximately 3 hours, going up to 24 hours. W3Techs.com puts Google Analytics in first place for traffic analysis, with 81.3 percent market share, and puts Webtrends at number 26, with 0.5 percent.
The beauty of Google Docs is that users can work on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations anywhere there's Internet access. When you consider the necessity of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Google's move to take those services into the cloud in 2007 seems less like prescience and more like common sense. A limitation of Google Docs is the lack of offline access. This problem was taken care of by Google Gears but was then removed, though Google has said that ability will return. Pricewise, Google Docs is free for individuals and $5 per user, per month for businesses, compared with a $150 to $499 range for Office 2010 versions. Microsoft is now floating its own cloud offering, Office 365, priced from $2 to $27 per user, per month. While Office 2010 experienced slow sales, in a July 2010 blog post, NPD said it didn't attribute that to Google Docs. NPD did comment at the time that consumers were not likely to embrace the idea of the cloud in the short- to mid-term. That might change now that Google and Microsoft are going head to head.
Web-based mail brought email to the masses. Before that, email was either something you paid for by having an ISP account or got through academic or corporate access. Hotmail was the first of the webmail offerings, which might account for why it's still the most popular. When Gmail showed up in 2004, it came bearing gifts, namely 1GB of free storage at a time when Hotmail offered 2MB and Yahoo offered 4MB. Invitations were sparse at first, creating demand and resulting in people selling invites on eBay. Now we're seeing the same thing happening with Google+. Today, Gmail isn't at the top of the pack, but it's certainly the fastest-growing. ComScore puts its growth at 29 percent from February 2010 to February 2011, with all other major webmail providers (Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL) falling.
Chrome OS v. Windows
There had long been questions about what Google would do if it created its own OS. It turns out the answers were in plain sight, as we discovered in our first hands on with the OS. It was a mostly Wi-Fi-dependent Chrome OS that pretty much mimicked the Chrome browser. Still, Chrome was big news, since challengers to Microsoft's Windows are few and often unsuccessful. Google went right to the quick, using a lightweight Linux model to get to the concerns Windows users have about security and bloat. Google partnered with Samsung and Acer to launch Chromebooks that go to the cloud for applications and data, theoretically relieving users of the hassle of software updates or backing up files and building in security features, such as automatic updating, process sandboxing, and reversion to a safe state. Whether Chrome OS will dethrone Windows is still to be known.
Google Talk v. AIM
The ability to chat with your friends all day while at work was made possible by AOL Instant Messenger. AIM was pretty much unrivaled, but once Google one-upped its communications by embedding Google Talk's Gchat function into Gmail, it didn't take much time for AIM to become outmoded. Beyond the cool factor of using something Google-branded, Gchat is also not likely to be blocked in the workplace. While there aren't statistics on the numbers of AIM users versus. Gchat users, the fact that AIM has created a way to export all "buddies" to Gchat speaks volumes.
Google Calendar v. Outlook Calendar
Google Calendar and Microsoft's Outlook Calendar both share an advantage: they're built into frequently used email programs, making them nearly impossible not to use. Google Calendar ups this, though, by being free and available everywhere (the latter is something Microsoft's Office 365 has set out to conquer). For those who use Outlook at work but want their calendar available everywhere, lo and behold, it's Google that's come up with a solution for that. Google Calendar Sync imports people's Outlook calendar info into their Google Calendars.
Google Maps v. MapQuest
There are those brand names that go from proper nouns to just nouns to—if they're really successful—verbs. MapQuest was one of those. If you wanted to find the location of a new bar that your friend recommended, you "Mapquested" it. Google found its way into MapQuest's world when it acquired Where 2 Technologies in 2004. The moment that really pushed it over the edge for Google was when those Street View cars started rolling, invading peoples' lives (and their privacy). Not only could you now see where the bar was, you knew you just had to walk a few steps past that restaurant you'd also meant to check out. The features of Google Maps have leapfrogged, with Google Maps for Mobile bringing GPS services (without the need for a GPS receiver) to phone platforms of nearly every stripe. On the 36th anniversary of the moon landing, Google spliced together imagery of the moon and brought it into the Maps interface, bringing Google Moon to earth. In 2005, the company let users travel to Google Mars. Now that's just showing off
Google Translate v. Yahoo! Babel Fish
The "worldwide" part of the Web is a bit misleading. Without real-time translation, there isn't true, full access to the most comprehensive collection of human knowledge. While Yahoo's Babel Fish took its name from a character in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who instantaneously eliminated all language barriers, it doesn't quite have the same alacrity. Babel Fish translates just upwards of 30 languages and runs on SYSTRAN, which was the machine translation leader ever since it was developed for defense purposes in the 1960s. SYSTRAN is a rules-based engine. Google initially used SYSTRAN when it started running translation services in its search results. But by the time Google Translate was rolled out as a full service in 2009, the company was using its own proprietary translation engine, which supports 50-odd languages and relies on a statistical model that finds patterns in writing for a more natural-sounding result. As for that fictional Babel Fish? There's an app for that. Google Translate offers an app that translates not just what's typed in (in 50 languages), but what's spoken (in 15 languages).
Google+ v. Facebook
It's a little too early to call this one. Google does have the advantage of surprise, but it's caused a "buzz" before. This also means that it may have learned from its own and Facebook's mistakes. So far, it seems Google+ has tried to differentiate itself. It's got Hangouts, Sparks, and some other features Facebook lacks. But Facebook still has a few things over Google+, including an audience of 750 million. If you're keeping score at home, give Google points for managing to make Facebook's "something awesome" into something we already had.
Post Credit: PcMag.com
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