A person at a gathering today expressed wonder at how all of the products Google has made and the impact they’ve had on our lives has been underpinned by ads and billions of clicks.
The cynical view of the company is that it creates products with the sole intent of gathering more information about you and creating more destinations to serve you ads.
The more optimistic view is that Google remains a company that seeks to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. And that they are thrilled that the success of ads from an early day has helped them with the cash to fund this mission. I would like to believe that this is how management thinks, despite the company’s growth over the past twenty years and the founders stepping back.
Over ten years ago, I wrote of Google and Microsoft
Companies like these are larger than the “next big thing”. Their own “thing” is so incredibly significant, so humbling.
– June 2009
Google’s Gmail, Photos, Android have done a tremendous job organising personal information. Maps and Search are modern-day wonders that have indexed and organised the real and virtual worlds. But there are new types of information constantly being created. There is so much more left to be indexed, made sense of and ‘made accessible and useful’.
This is a mission spanning at least fifty more years, probably much longer. And if ads can help achieve it, so be it.