Not even Googlers were certain that Larry Page would make an appearance at the kickoff to the tech giant’s annual developer conference in San Francisco Wednesday. But there he was on stage, in a red t-shirt, with a matching microphone and his quiet, froggy voice filling the room. And as Page spoke, his voice not only grew stronger, the impression grew stronger that this is the man, and Google the company, that is leading technology today.
Page didn’t sell products, he sold a vision. It’s a vision of a world where technology is an ever-present assistant freeing us from the drudgery of remembering phone numbers, calendar reminders, or ever being lost again. It is a world where everyone has access to the latest in ideas and education. And where those who already have the access and the technical skills bear a responsibility to help spread the best technology has to offer to everyone else.
At that moment, Page was talking about himself, about every Google employee, the 6,000 in attendance at the conference and the 1 million people watching on YouTube. He wants an army of tech-savvy people to help him transform, not just Silicon Valley, but every industry – from automobiles to healthcare - and every institution – from law to education. “Our old institutions, like the law, haven’t evolved to keep pace with the rate of change (brought about by technology),” Page says. “Maybe more of us need to go into other areas and help those areas improve and understand technology.”
Page took the lead in chiding his fellow tech companies for leeching off each other. (Google lawyers followed through on that thought with a cease-and-desist letter to Microsoft for stripping ads out of YouTube and permitting downloads in its Windows Phone app.) “You need to have inter-operation, not just people milking off one company for their own benefit,” Page said. “We should be building great things that don’t exist. Being negative is not how we create progress. Most important things are not zero-sum.”
Easy for Page to say, since Google is clearly the company holding the data and the applications/services lead–search, Android, Chrome, maps, YouTube–that sure seem to be the key to the future of computing. But even there, Page exhorted the competition and his peers to push much harder. In the parlance of Google, to go after their own moonshots. “I’d encourage more companies to do things that are a little bit outside of their comfort zone because I think it gives them more scalability in what they can get done,” Page said. “Almost every time we have tried do something crazy we have made progress, not all the time, but much of the time.”
That progress has certainly extended to Wall Street. As the geek faithful gathered in San Francisco to talk the arcana of coding, Google true believers on Wall Street were busy genuflecting in their own way Wednesday. The search giant's stock shattered the $900 ceiling, peaking above $916 before settling down a few cents lower to close at $915.89. It was also a reminder, that for all the humanity changing notions in Page’s head, he’s also created a company that is a money machine.
And, based on a smaller announcement made Wednesday, there could be a lot more money coming.
Skeptics may marvel at a company that could break $900 a share the same day it announced its launch of a new product as unoriginal as a Spotify clone. Setting aside the Apple-like advantage Google instantly gains from already living in so many pockets, another less-noticed announcement signifies the immense potential Google has to make more money simply by flicking the new-feature switch.
In a post on the Google Commerce blog, the company made known that you will be able to send money by Gmail using Google Wallet. Over the coming months, Gmail users will start to see that hovering over the paper clip in the compose window will reveal a dollar sign icon you can use to "attach" money to an email as easily as you would a file. The payee doesn't need a Gmail account to receive the money.
In addition to finally offering a simple, easy-to-understand use for Google Wallet, the ability to pay by Gmail makes serious business sense as a way to compete with the likes of PayPal, which handled $145 billion in payments last year and brought in $5.6 billion in revenue. But people don't log in to PayPal to check their email. Gmail is a constant presence in the lives of many of its 425 million active users. Instead of requiring a special service you seek out, the ability to send money through Gmail makes digital payments another thing you can do while you check your email.
For Google, such a shift in behavior would represent a major opportunity to harvest fees as money zips across its servers. (The company says sending money directly from your bank account or Google Wallet balance will be free, while sending funds from a credit or debit card will cost 2.9 percent per transaction).
But as with nearly everything else Google does, the bigger business opportunity is data. The more ways Google can figure out how to get people to use Google Wallet, the more access Google has to data on individual financial behavior. Yesterday Google became a $300 billion business thanks to its ingenuity at monetizing data on search behavior. Imagine how much more valuable the company could become as Google's brain learns how people spend.
