Google Shopping Express

One Day, Google Will Deliver the Stuff You Want Before You Ask

Fresh off the tail of Monday's class on eBay and Amazon, Google answers "Yes" to the question, "Does eBay play in the same stack as Google?" Last Wednesday, Google announced a same-day shipping service titled, Google Shopping Express, further blurring the stack lines of the tech giants we've discussed thus far. The service is in direct competition with eBay Now (one-hour delivery service), and as you may correctly suspect, Amazon as well. Just don't expect eBay to retaliate with a self-driving car...or maybe...

Considering Eli's good point of eBay perceived as an "antique" e-shop, would you use Google for your online shopping needs given the new service? Or do they suffer from a different branding issue that also ends in a lack of e-tail sales?

Google versus Facebook: Some Statistics

This infograph from Mashable could provide a good backdrop for our discussions about Google versus Facebook.

How should Google maintain its browser-based advantage?

One of the themes in yesterday's discussion was how Google's dominance in the browser-layer is key to its monetization strategy.  I like someone in the class with some deep technical expertise to develop a coherent argument to go deeper into this theme.  Google's Eric Schmidt initially was reluctant for Google to commit to this project.  In a 2009 WSJ article, Larry Page described "the Chrome operating system as a kind of anti-operating system — one that is basically indistinguishable from a browser. Netbooks loaded with Chrome will boot up almost instantaneously and will store data on the Internet instead of a hard drive.

....I wanted the operating system to kind of be out of the way.”
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There are good technical descriptions of what makes Google Chrome different. Here's one for example. There's even a comic book version.  We know that the first browser war between Microsoft (IE) and Netscape (Navigator) was 'won' by Microsoft.  Now, the browser war is between Microsoft (IE) and Google (Chrome) but the shape and scope of browser is different.  It's a gateway to knowing the user (privacy), providing relevant advertisements (monetization) as well as creating the foundation for the future logic of interactions between individuals and companies. 

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Any takers to develop more detailed connection between the technical architecture and business logic of monetization on the morphing of browser/OS layers?