The disrupter disrupted

Until now. AI is different. And Google is feeling it. This is a new category that Google has little claim on. It’s also a category with directly comparable rivals. Ones that you can jump into bed with any time and try out. Ones that keep getting better and keep getting talked about in the media. And it’s a category that is fundamentally different from the indirect services like search or mail where Google has prospered. You go to Gemini and ask it to make things or answer questions. If the subsequent responses are stupid or inferior to other options, it’s not the fault of the internet, it’s the fault of Gemini. And users can see it. Even Google acknowledges it.

“I know some responses have offended our users and shown bias,” Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai recently told his staff. What a special day that must have been for Pichai. To be a fly on his Palo Alto wall when he realised that, because of his team’s ham-fisted attempts to apply diversity to AI, the outcome had become hilariously inappropriate. And that he now had to apologise to the very people that his company had been trying to protect, for a sin it had been explicitly trying to absolve itself from. “To be clear… we got it wrong… we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes.”

Pichai is right, of course. It’s early days. And given he sits on top of a gigantic company with gigantic revenues, housing enormous incentives to innovate with AI, it’s likely that Google will get its shit together and Gemini will smarten up and stop drawing pictures of Native American pontiffs. A couple of long-term concerns remain, however.
As a brand like Google softens internally, it becomes associated with the past externally. With the 1990s. With your Uncle Terry. With PCs. Windows. Old shit.
The main issue is Google’s age and size. These are both significant advantages. But they also play a reverse role when it comes to disruption and category evolution. The history of marketing is littered with examples of brands that grew and then dominated their time, their categories and their market. But in domination comes danger. Bureaucracy blossoms. Arrogance grows. The pirates jump ship, to be replaced by second-rate politicians. Companies forget the fire of market orientation. They start to think they deserve market share. That consumers owe them. Legacy makes them soft.

And as a brand like Google softens internally with age, it also becomes externally associated with the past in the minds of consumers. With the World Wide Web. With the 1990s. With your Uncle Terry. With PCs. Old shit. Brand heritage is a double edged sword. Its legitimises you and limits you at the same time.
Add to that a tranche of hungry new competitors unencumbered by politics, political correctness or conservative shareholders, and you have the perfect recipe for imminent change. When founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met they were broke, in their 20s, and had zero skin in the game. Today they are two of the richest people on the planet and sit on the board of one of the world’s biggest companies. They should fear the 21st-century version of themselves. Two unlikely college students currently sitting in an Ivy League bedroom,  working on AI, eating pizza and giving not a single fuck about anything.

An outdated mission
And one further specific issue now hangs heavy for Google. Its mission may also be becoming irrelevant. In possibly the biggest ever exemplar of ‘what got you here will not get you there’, the company faces an upcoming existential moment squarely centred on the company’s founding vision.
Coined back in 1998 at the very origin of the company, Google’s mission (above) is unusual in that it is free from the usual purpose-wank that afflicts so many big positioning statements. And it’s even rarer because it truly operates as a North Star for the whole organisation. Google really did set out to fulfill this mission all those years ago and as the information grew and the organisational challenges followed, Google managed it all.
It was a mission that was perfectly timed for the explosion of too much information in the late 20th century, and the growing digital potential to organise it for grateful users as a new century emerged. But what if society is about to change? What if the new AI era is one in which people do not need the organisation of their information? And don’t want access to it all? What if, as is so often the case, the consumer decision-making process is about truncating a step? What if people don’t want all the world’s information organised and accessible anymore? What if they just want the answer? Courtesy of AI. Now.
Think about it. Your grandchildren will laugh when you tell them how you would type a query into a box. Then you would get a long list of ‘search results’. Pages of them. And you would then peruse those pages for information. The more results your search revealed, the better you thought the ‘search engine’ was. They will laugh at the box, at the typing, at the list, and the hilarious bit where you scan the answers using your mouse. Because for the whole of their mid-21st-century life, they have just asked for and immediately been given The Answer.

Organising information and making it accessible to you will become the equivalent of a DVD rental for generations ahead of us. And, like Blockbuster or Kodak or American Railroads, or all the other companies that missed the next kink in the eternal chain of consumer evolution, it’s not that Google does not see the changes up ahead. It’s that everything thus far in its quarter-century evolution has been built to serve a mission that may now be irrelevant. And it must change course and culture and operations in time to keep up with others that carry much less baggage and possess a far greater incentive to change the current status quo of the market. What made Google great for one era makes it weaker than others for the next.

The heart of Google’s challenge is not amateurishly woke programming or even a hilariously stupid AI product. It’s that search engines are a legacy technology. That a 30-year window might be closing. And with it, much of Google’s long-established market power.

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