Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Is Google headed for a downturn? Not only is it featured in a generally negative cover article in this week’s Barron’s, but now it’s featured on the cover of Time as well. These magazines cater to very different audiences, so turning up on both at the same time could be considered a sign that Google is reaching a peak of sorts on both the financial and general cultural fronts.

There’s a long tradition of things going badly for companies and people after getting this sort of high profile magazine cover treatment. If Google turns up next on the cover of People or Entertainment Weekly they’re probably doomed…

Update 02-12-2006 18:31 PST: John Battelle suggests that having made the cover of Time, Google has “jumped the shark”, while Matt Cutts offers a recent historical perspective of Google’s non-shark-jumping behavior while simultaneously demonstrating effective link baiting technique.

I don’t consider myself an expert on shark-jumping, but I do think that hitting the covers of Barrons and Time is qualitatively different than the counter-examples that Matt offers. Google is transitioning out of being loved for being better, new, and whizzy, and into a stage where people expect it to “just work”. Google has gotten large enough that people are developing a love/hate relationship with it (and web services in general) like they have with e-mail, and where the discussion about privacy, media, and commerce is just starting to get some critical attention from people outside tech land.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2006 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Business, Search Engines, Humor, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.