I love this article.

AND I’m going to throw a tiny wrench into the readership pool, not into the article.

My thesis is simple.

There was a stretch when “most of us” learned that Google was in our list of Needs, not just our list of Nice To Haves or Cools. Google then readily made us ask the question, “what other ways could or should we have to discover more of what we care about the most?”

The key difference I’m pointing at lies in the Who Cares Test. There is a plausible argument that most of us don’t care about Google’s business model, because we don’t actually Need Google anymore. A “collapse” of Google is interesting primarily to tech strategists and stockholders. If they want Google to not Collapse, let them bear the brunt of the effort to make it so. The “rest of us” don’t actually care. Something else, one or more things, already exists that will take over nicely.

Now, as I said, I love this article.

It shows, so clearly, how the interconnectedness of things makes evolution inevitable, with some expectation of roadkill along the way. The hotspot in the scenario is, in my view, what consumers learned that they didn’t know before: selling your identity is easy and convenient but has questionable consequences.

I think the interesting comparison to make is between Google circa 2012 and Uber now. Drivers are in effect selling their personal resource to a unicorn, for a price having less of an ROI than they would get being a lender. The real business model here consists of making people financial stakeholders without making them shareholders — and even charging your suppliers to be your suppliers. Is that business model obsolete?

MR / Archestra Research