Not Doing Something New Seems Like a Crime

Larry Page
Co-founder of Google Inc.

Nobody can really predict the future despite the numerous information we have to aid the suggestions. But there is one thing for sure: the technology world will keep advancing as long as people keep dreaming.

The future of technology is formerly in the hands of technology giants. But smaller companies, and many startups have began creating interesting and useful products that they can be as well, become a part of defining the future.

On the internet, technology giants make most of their incomes and assets from advertisements. Google that accounts to most of the web traffic today has matured faster than most people expected. The company that started its life as a search engine, has dived into many other services beyond its initial business. The tech giant now supports a vast array of services that variously offer search, chat, email, file storage, media sharing, online tracking, ads targeting, mobile development, operating systems, and many other services.

Despite moving away from its core service, Google is investing significant amount of money to explore and invent seemingly unrelated technologies. Google has put a lot of bet into its Google X division where "moonshots" innovations are expected to happen.

The division have acquired many specialist startups covering robotics, machine learning, self-driving cars, internet distribution with balloons, and many more.

If one wonders why, the answer is pretty simple. Google aims to improve lives in overall. This is a huge contrast to Apple, the Cupertino-based technology giant that built its fame from premium design and experience since the early computer era.

The differences between the two companies is: one being hyper-focused on a small set of products (Apple), and another with eyes in seemingly everything (Google). The late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had once stated that Google's co-founder Larry Page has gone way too much in bringing Google up as a company. Google has too many services, and Jobs thought that these would deliberately bring the company down because of less focus and more distributed resources.

"He would always tell me, 'You're doing too much stuff.' I'd be like, 'You're not doing enough stuff,'" Page said of Jobs. He even said that "it seems like a crime" to sit on the resources of a company like Apple or Google, and not "do something new."

Google may already been known to stack up against the limits of what is possible for one company to do. Just like other technology giants, Google sits on a vast amount of resources: the intellectual prowess of engineers and scientists, the brilliant minds of entrepreneurs, as well as more than adequate financial support.

Google that has over a hundred billion of dollars in assets, and shareholders can expect a diversification of revenue streams to make the company less vulnerable to changes in consumer behavior.

Investing into new products gives insight into what may the future possible trends be. At Google's scale, with at least a billion of active users each month, introducing a trial version can certainly influence consumers.

Google was once confidently described as an advertising company, but its business now could be seen as disruption. With its massive size of network power, technical approach and other resources, the company can challenge and dive into many possible innovations that were once unthinkable. Supported by its core advertising revenue, Google can afford to ignore its existing business models to aim for new ones.

Despite technological innovation, no one can yet claim to see the future. But with Google's oversight of consumer behavior taken from many of its services, including Androids, the tech giant has the highest chance to determine the future than any organizations on Earth.

"What Steve said is right - you, Larry, can only manage so many things."

This has come true to Apple. The company also sees the technology world is advancing more than anyone can imagine. Apple has expanded its business into more things than ever before by spending huge amount of resources into research and development. But despite Apple always keeps its project a secret, tightly sealed behind closed doors before their initial introductions, Apple is less likely have Google's "moonshot" ambitions.

If Google, and other tech companies no regardless their size, are to win, they will have to beat the odds by trying their best to innovate based on the will to keep improving. The world has seen many great companies back in its past, particularly in the tech industry. But only a few leaders from one generation of technology have made it to the next big thing.