REPORT CARD: How Good Are Google's Other Businesses?Reported by Business Insider on Tuesday, 14 February 2012 (on February 14, 2012)
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 Google needs to diversify.
After 14 years, more than 95% of its money still comes from online advertising, and most of that comes from search.
This is not for lack of trying. Over the years, Google has launched a many new products beyond search. Most of them don't contribute much to Google's bottom line, although some of them serve important strategic purposes.
Now, Google is making a big play for hardware. It's the biggest and potentially riskiest shift in Google's history.
Can Google win? Should it even bother trying?
To get a better idea, we decided to look at all the other businesses Google has entered and give a grade to each one.
-Smartphones: A--
Android has been a huge hit for Google. After spending about $50 million to buy a bare bones smartphone operating system in 2005, Google turned Android into the world's leading smartphone operating system in less than five years.
The only reason this is an A- instead of an A? Because, while the iPhone contributed more than $24 billion to Apple's coffers just last QUARTER, Android still doesn't make Google very much money. Google gives it away for free. The company says that it earns about $1 billion a year from mobile advertising, but a lot of that comes from other platforms -- including the iPhone.
Strategically, it may not matter. Google's whole point with Android was to make sure that competitors like Apple didn't block out Google Search -- or the mobile Web -- in favor of apps. Still, with the purchase of Motorola, it looks like Google wants a bigger cut of the pie.
-Web browsers: A-
Chrome is a lot like Android.
Here, Google came out of nowhere into a well-established market and quickly changed the landscape. Just more than three years after it launched, Chrome became the second-most popular browser -- ahead of Firefox. Internet Explorer is still bigger, but it ships on hundreds of millions of new PCs every year.
And like Android, Chrome serves a larger purpose -- making sure that third-party Web browsers don't break or block Google services, while delivering a speedy and reliable Web browsing experience, which keeps people online longer.
Chrome is also a free product, but nobody's making any money from Web browsers, so there's no reason to expect Google to do so either.
-Netbooks: D-
The other aspect of Chrome is Chrome OS, an operating system that is almost identical to the browser, but is meant to overcome some of the problems with Windows on cheap portable computers, or netbooks.
Chromebooks are cheap, start up extremely fast, are easy to update and patch, and run everything over the Web.
But they also don't support a lot of hardware -- good luck syncing your MP3 player, connecting to a printer, or getting photos from your digital camera -- and there aren't nearly as many apps available for them as there are for Windows. Plus, the entire netbook market has been crushed by the rise of the iPad.
Overall, this feels like an experimental project that sounded great back in 2007 when netbooks were hot, but has since been overtaken by events.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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*See Also:*
· Google's Foray Into Hardware Will Be A Total Disaster — Here's Why
· THE GOOGLE INVESTOR: Facebook Has Microsoft As Ally To Take On Google
· Sorry, Google Plus: Google Uses Facebook To Tease Product Launch
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