Bobby Pickering

Google has had another sterling quarter, with revenue growth of 100% -­ well ahead of Wall Street’s expected 85% growth. Much of that came from increasing European demand, with the proportion of revenues outside the US jumping from 38% to 42%.

The Code Jam programming competition has made headlines, an attempt to discover a cadre of “Europe’s brightest engineers”, and probably offer them plum jobs. It’s a good strategic move on Google’s part, because so far few people, other than Wall Street investors, are able to profit from the Google bandwagon. What Google needs are business partners and evangelists who can take the message out to the wider masses.

Apple and Microsoft, after all, built their empires on companies and individuals who became close partners or built careers around their products. They were the shock troops who made the technologies deliver business benefits to users. Being trained and certified in Microsoft technologies was a good addition to any IT worker’s CV.

Google has, up till now, made a lot of enemies. And those foe are starting to fight back, some with the potential to wound. Autonomy and Fast regard its latest attempts to make headway in the enterprise search market (more security-rich products, and key alliances with Oracle and others) as laughable. They claim it’s at the “low-end of the market”, and if that spin sticks, Google is in trouble.

Meanwhile, Microsoft manoeuvres menacingly with developments in the offing on both MSN Search (watch out for IE7 and Windows Live) and Microsoft Academic Search (competition at last for Google Scholar).

What Google needs now is to make more friends, not more enemies. And those friends may well come from the information profession. How clever would an accredited Google Information Engineer programme be? Individuals trained to implement information-centric solutions in a world hung-up on information technology.

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