Google’s next move: free sites and domains for businesses
Most weeks, Google makes an incremental move that seems, in retrospect, obvious.
Earlier this month, I wrote about their real estate listings attached to Google Maps which will quickly become a major challenge for the established sites such as domain.com.au and realestate.com.au.
Indeed, I get the sense that a real priority for Google at present is developing new business services around local search anchored, of course, around Google Maps.
But the latest initiative in the UK is still a doozy in terms of its ability to disrupt the market. Who’d be a domain broker or site builder when Google has just started giving both away for free? There are plenty of digital agencies that make a big chunk of their living from creating basic sites for small businesses. It may be time to come up with a new business plan.
Telstra seemed to be attached to building its own online and mobile services and having them direct traffic to each other. Sensis, BigPond TV, Whereis Navigator and Trading Post. Not to mention the “portal” web pages on Telstra supplied phones.
It’s hard to see how any of these products and services can survive against best of breed competitors.
It will be interesting to see whether Telstra gets back into providing telecommunications for services to run on, which it is in a position to do better than other companies, or if it plugs away in areas where other companies make better products and services than it can.
Telstra is game in mobile too http://apcmag.com/telstra-to-l.....-store.htm
“Yep, we want to do that. Our strategy is always to make sure that we invest in our Big Pond asset. You’ll start to see some pretty clever stuff happening in devices. I don’t know if we’ll call it the Telstra app store but it’ll be one click, pretty simple to use.”
Google’s been doing this for years under the Google Apps banner (http://www.google.com/apps/int.....index.html). They’re just now getting a bit more savvy about marketing the stuff and making it easier for Joe Public to use.
I saw an advert for Yellow Pages, which was about finding a company using a desktop computer and sending the number for the company via sms to a mobile phone. Eh? I want to spray graffiti on the advert(it was at a bus stop), which reads: “Just Google it using your phone”.
Sensis are trying to hold on – I do not give them much hope, they will be dead a buried in the next 5 years… (Or continuing to sell a lie to thousands of ignorant small businesses.)
Perhaps one of the reasons that they have gone with this is that the pace of UK small businesses going online has been relatively slow and often the sites are quite feeble.
I am not sure how this model is much different from the Peakhour waste of time that was launched at the turn of the century (and was supposed by now to be ruling the world). or indeed from the clunky websites (sans a real domain) you can build via one Google Account option or another.
Frankly I can’t see how this is all going to work. To build an adequate website you need to take some time, a measure of literacy and a vague idea of design. Not all SMEs have these in any measure at all. Or we could end up with plethora of sites built by the proprietors’ kids (like they used to do when Frontpage first came out) and then abandoned when it all gets too hard leaving the web littered with out of date sites.
Alternatively: I for one welcome our new Googley masters.
google sites has been around for a few years, and you can do all of the above in about 10 minutes with it as is. the functionality is enough for most SMEs.