Larry Page's five big challenges as Google CEO

By John Shinal
Apr 6, 2011 00:01:11 (ET)

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Larry Page returns to his former job at Google Inc. this week, as do I as we relaunch the Tech Investor column for MarketWatch after a more than three-year hiatus. So it only seems appropriate that we discuss Page's biggest challenges as chief executive, a title he held for several years prior to the hiring of Eric Schmidt in August 2001.

While I was off working at a start-up, helping to launch a new tech-jobs website, Page's company nearly doubled its annual revenue, which reached almost $30 billion in 2010. Along with being the market leader in Internet search, Google (GOOG, Trade ) is also the U.S. market leader in smartphone-operating systems, thanks to Android.

Yet in one important way, Google doesn't look all that different than the last time I wrote about the company. It still gets the overwhelming percentage of its profit from one source: search advertising. This dependence on a single market leaves Google vulnerable, over the long term, to several challenges.

Here are Page's five biggest:

Some may argue that Microsoft Corp. (MSFT, Trade ) is a bigger threat to Google, because Microsoft has a lot more cash -- a lot of which it intends to spend attacking Google's leading market-share positions in Internet search and mobile-phone operating systems.

But those who make that argument are forgetting a key maxim of Silicon Valley: Beware of the guys in the garage. Profitable, public technology companies with many billions of dollars in annual sales are rarely usurped by other large companies that beat them at their own game. If Microsoft could have beaten Google at search, it would have done so already. (Sorry, Bing.)

More often than not, it's a new, younger competitor that is doing something different -- anticipating a shift in the market -- that blows up an existing tech franchise. Executives who defect from Google's Mountain View, Calif., campus don't fly two hours up to Redmond, Wash., to work for Microsoft. Instead, in increasing numbers, they drive four exits north on Highway 101 to work in Palo Alto.

The market shift that Facebook has anticipated is the move toward a more social Web. The Internet is now so crowded with information from so-called experts (including tech-investing columnists) that it's hard to find what's useful. A growing number of users are discovering that the best filters are our friends, family members, co-workers and other people we know and trust.

While most people who want to search for something still go to Google, even more log on to Facebook every day and find things out without having to search for them. Last year, when Facebook supplanted Google as the top Web destination -- first in the United States, then in the rest of the world -- it was a watershed moment in the history of the Internet. Given the growth rate of Facebook compared with that of Google, no one is expecting that trend to reverse itself.

A source that has seen Facebook's financials told me that the company generated $680 million in operating cash last year on $2 billion in sales. If accurate, that represents an operating margin of 34%. For 2010, Google's same margin is expected to have been roughly 38%. That's rarified air for large companies, and Facebook is breathing it right alongside Google.

It's not going to happen overnight or even next year. But three years from now, if Google is still relying on Internet search for the bulk of its profits, it will face, in Facebook, a much bigger competitor in the online-ad market than it does today.

Yes, you read that right. After Facebook, the biggest threat to Google is the search giant's own lack of fiscal discipline. For several years now, it's been funding more internal projects and making more disparate acquisitions than any public company that cares about its shareholders should make.

No one cares, of course, because the company is still printing cash, thanks to its search dominance. But no fountain flows forever, and some day when its search revenue or profitability starts to ebb, investors will demand greater accountability. (They won't get it, of course, because Google's dual-class share structure has kept all voting rights with a handful of insiders, but that's fodder for another column.)

The only person capable of imposing that discipline will be Page.

It's not that Google hasn't made quality acquisitions. DoubleClick was a good buy even though it cost Google $3.1 billion, because it cemented the company's dominant position with online advertisers and publishers. Also, the 2003 acquisition of Applied Semantics was a shrewd strategic move, because at that time Applied was an important distribution partner for Overture, the paid-search company that soon after was bought by Yahoo.

But Google's more recent record of loose spending, where it spends $1 billion or more on companies such as YouTube, then tries to figure out after the fact how to make them profitable, should be of concern to shareholders.

While the software giant is not a current threat to Google in Internet search, barring some government intervention (see below), Microsoft's new alliance with Nokia Corp. (NOK, Trade ) could present a major challenge to the newly won lead of Android in the market for smartphone-operating systems.

This threat from Microsoft is very different than that from Apple Inc. (AAPL, Trade ), whose marketing angle in smartphones is the tech-gadget equivalent of "I'm expensive, but I'm worth it." It's hard to see the maker of the iPad and iPhone slugging it out with Android for the lower-priced niches of the handset market.That's not Apple's corporate M.O.

In other words, I think Google is a more aggressive threat to Apple in the mobile-device market right now than Apple is to Google.

Not so with Nokia. Although its Symbian OS has lost its market lead in the United States, the Finnish company is still the global leader in handset sales, accounting for 34% of all shipments in 2010, according to tech-research firm Strategy Analytics.

The Nokia-Microsoft partnership has many hurdles of its own, to be sure. The major one is that all the market momentum is against it right now, and with no new phones in the pipeline with a feature set to match an Android or iPhone, Nokia's market share is going to get worse this year, at least in America.

In the long run, though, the combination has two key assets: a global army of software developers dedicated to the Windows mobile (now Windows Phone) platform, and Nokia's experience designing easy-to-use, good-looking phones and other mobile devices. While it's hard to believe this given the echo chamber that surrounds the iPhone ("there's an app for that"), the majority of people on this planet still buy a mobile phone to make voice calls, not use apps.

If Nokia Chief Executive Stephen Elop can create a Windows Phone-based product line that holds its own in the U.S. market while building on the company's still-strong position overseas, Microsoft-Nokia will be a threat to take market share from Android.

Although Microsoft has been unable to dent Google's leading search position in the U.S. market with its technology, that hasn't stopped it from appealing to its old enemies in the Justice Department for a little regulatory help.

Some in Silicon Valley or the legal community might snicker at the irony of Microsoft complaining to the DOJ, given that Microsoft was found guilty of antitrust charges filed by the same department in 2000 -- a ruling that was upheld on appeal in 2001.

But that attitude is dated, and it ignores the fact that there are many powerful people in the federal government -- both in Congress and the executive branch -- concerned about Google's dominance of the Internet-advertising market and its privacy policies.

In the time between when this column was written and when it was edited, a report surfaced that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission may examine Google's search practices.

Authorities in Europe (which has a stronger regulatory regime than the United States when it comes to antitrust issues and Internet privacy) already have asked Google to modify its data-collection practices. The company could face further restrictions, either on its data collection or on the way it displays the search results of competitors. Any such restrictions in Europe or the United States could limit Google's ability to compete in the online-advertising market.

I've been saying this for five years, and for the sake of Google investors, I hope Page finally takes note.

The totalitarian communist government that controls the world's most-populous country is never going to let a foreign firm have control of a market or industry it deems vital to national security. Officials have demonstrated this in the markets for telecom services, telecom equipment (which is why Huawei is Cisco Systems Inc.'s (CSCO, Trade ) worst nightmare in Asia) and yes, Internet services.

Google already operates at a disadvantage to rival Baidu Inc. (BIDU, Trade ), which cooperates fully with the Chinese Internet police, whereas Google, to its credit, has a more nuanced relationship with the security apparatus in that country.

The only way Google is ever going to win market share from Baidu as the top search provider in China is if a government comes to power there that allows full freedom of information online. Given that the Chinese government has stepped up its harassment and arrests of dissidents and clamped down on Internet activists in the wake of the uprisings in the Arab world, that's not likely anytime soon.

Unless and until that happens, Page is wasting Google's money by investing in China. As a lover of democracy, I must say that the company should boycott that nation -- a decision that would indicate Google, under Page, wants to live up to its "don't be evil" philosophy. Alternately, Google could stop all cooperation with the Chinese Internet authorities and allow itself to be forced out of the market there.

Yes, that sounds crazy. But is it any crazier than allowing a bunch of Google vehicles to drive all over the world, collecting mapping coordinates and information on private WiFi networks for its Street View service, that have now prompted antitrust investigations in Europe and the States?

Good luck, Larry Page! Eric Schmidt left you with several hornet's nests that will keep life interesting.

Editor's note: Look for John Shinal's Tech Investor every Wednesday and Friday on MarketWatch, and follow him on Twitter @johnshinal.