Google – King of the Distributed Business Model

In my recent post entitled “The Four Pillars of Distributed Businesses,” I take a look at some of the companies that have been making headway in terms gaining distribution through widgets, toolbars, APIs, and Facebook Apps.

As Daniel points out in the comments, Google has category killing plays in the areas of APIs, toolbars, and widgets (YouTube / AdSense).  In a sign that they’re taking Facebook seriously as a distribution channel, yesterday Google announced the launch of a Google Facebook App.

In Q2 of 2007, Google did $1.35B of revenue, or 35% of its total quarterly revenue, on domains other than Google.com.

They have the footprint, and they are earning revenue from that footprint.  And now they have a Facebook App to round out their coverage of the four pillars.

While pundits like me, and Ivan, and Hooman, Charlie O'Donnell, and Oren Michels theorize about how distributed business are the wave of the future, Google is doing it, and they’re doing it now.  No, they’re not just doing it.  They’re killing it.

(Note: Yahoo! has a toolbar, some widgets, some APIs, and even a few Facebook Apps (Upcoming, Flickr, etc.)

So if you’re still not a believer in Facebook as a distribution channel all its own, don’t take my word for it – take Google’s.  Sometimes actions speak louder than words.

Will Google’s social search app become a category killer like AdSense, the Google Toolbar, the Google Maps API, the YouTube widget, etc.?  Who knows.  When I think of things that I want to share with my friends, search engine results are pretty far down the list.

But obviously, Google is thinking about the Facebook channel, and now that they’re in the game, you can bet that they will be tweaking and iterating until they find something that works.

From an entrepreneurial perspective, I’m a little embarrassed that Google, and not some scrappy start-up, is doing the best job of covering the four pillars. 

(And what’s interesting about the Google model is that they’ve gone the inside out route – starting with a strong destination business – search – and then pushing that business out to the edge via AdSense, the Google Toolbar, APIs, widgets, and now Facebook.  Many of the businesses that I see today are going the outside in / MyBlogLog route – trying to build out a distributed presence that feeds back to a central hub.) 

So let’s have at it, my fellow entrepreneurs.  If you don’t want to build one yourself, you can buy a custom, white label toolbar for about $1500.  A Flash widget can be developed in a few hours.  A Facebook app can be a one developer job, and some of the most popular ones have been built in under a week.  And my understanding is that releasing an API is no great shakes, depending on how you’ve built your web service.

It would be disappointing if, after all of this talk about how people distributed applications are the great equalizer, it turns out that the biggest and baddest among us executes the best.   

Comments

[Ivan]

Excellent post, Lawrence. Inspirational. Coming back at ya. Cheers, Ivan