Google’s Future

My friend Richard Waters from the FT interviewed me the other day; he wanted to talk about Google’s future, now that the MS deal with Yahoo had apparently fallen through.  Specifically, he wanted to talk about whether Google would come up with the next big thing, to keep its momentum going.

I reminded Richard that the guys who run Google had not come up with the first big thing, i.e., they had not included online advertising in their first business plan, or in their original search technology.  Google was just the next in a long line of search engines.

So why would one expect them to come up with the next ?