“They have a fantastic cash cow. They need a goat and a chicken.” - Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com on Google
The fantastic cash cow of course is Adwords the search advertising system and the goat and chicken are the other projects that Google is working and so far are not making money.
Diversification is a never ending wish for entrepreneurs. They want to go beyond the original idea that brought them fame and bucks and try other things. It’s a human trait. We all get bored at one stage or another and look for other challenges or interests.
Successful musicians end up in movies while successful actors dabble into directing and production. NBA players release rap albums.
If I ran Google, I would figure out how to milk my cash cow even more and get the eyes off the goat and chicken.
Yes, Google is the leader is search ads not all online advertising is search and if Google managed advertisers of other online media to consider Adwords, that cash cow would produce gold-like milk.
Where could Google go next? After taking over the full online advertising market it could convince offline advertisers to come online and use Adwords. Imagine if all the car and drug advertisers spent their billions on Adwords. Google could eventually generate Walmart like yearly turnover of 378.80 billion compared to its 16.593 billion. Then I would really feel stupid for never buying stock.
OK, time to wake up from my dream!
