Comments on: Google and The Future of Lead Generation

By: Barry Anderson

Barry Anderson — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:06:15 +0000

Great article!
There’s no doubt that the world of marketing is changing more quickly than ever before – driven by the on-line world.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:51:40 +0000

2010 is going to be a very interesting arena in the mortgage vertical.

By: Twitted by jonstotts

Twitted by jonstotts — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 12:20:33 +0000

[...] This post was Twitted by jonstotts [...]

By: Lead Critic

Lead Critic — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:27:30 +0000

James,

Obviously, very good point, but it is all about the implementation. You could argue that the implementation of many of those products were wrong, but thats not the point. The point is if anything even becomes of this and they allow their merchant search feature rank the highest on the SERPs, then there is no question that it will take clicks away from the organic and paid listings. Is it going to be an industry killer? of course not. Its only a bunch of “what if” statements.

By: jamesbond

jamesbond — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:29:21 +0000

Microsoft circa Reagan/Bush/Clinton administrations – until the internet came around, unlike Google, now those guys WERE SCARY when they came after you outside their core business of Operating Systems:

MS Word – basically put WordPerfect out of business

MS Excel – SuperCalc and the others, toast

MS Powerpoint – remember Harvard Graphics?

MS Access – what did people even use before?

MS Outlook – Eudora? Lotus Notes? Hello?

IE – Netscape, billions of dollars of market cap and hundreds of millions of capital raised, slain

MSN – was putting a dent into AOL, and if not for FTC and their need for IE dominance over Netscape (thus they gave AOL a spot on the desktop in exchange for AOL switching to IE), probably really would have put the pain on AOL

But even MSFT wasn’t batting 1.000 back in the golden days – they took serious shots at Quicken, Quickbooks, Tax Software, and didn’t get anywhere. Expedia was successful; CarPoint.com and Sidewalk.com, Slate were not

MSNBC – money sink until MSFT got out of the biz

Interactive TV/OS for cable set top boxes – they invested billions in cable companies to try to win here, got nowhere

More recently –

Zune – loser

Xbox – put the hurt on Sony but Nintendo has thrived

By: jamesbond

jamesbond — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:19:20 +0000

Assuming Google launched this in limited scale in US in November, that’s 1.5 years from the UK test. Assuming the planned the UK test for 6 months, 2 years and counting.

That’s blazing fast product development, there Google

So will Google Lead Gen put LendingTree out of business? Umm….

Froogle – hasn’t even dented Shopping.com, Nextag, Smarter.com, Shopzilla

Gmail – that put Hotmail and Yahoo Mail out of business

Orkut – RIP Facebook and MySpace

Google Video – they were getting killed by YouTube and even AOL

Google Voice/IM – Skype just sold for $2.75 billion; Yahoo IM, MSN IM, AOL IM not hurt by this

Chrome – distant 4th to Safari, Firefox and IE

Google Analytics – its free and syncs seamlessly with Google search yet hasn’t put Omniture out of business

Android – look at Apple and Blackberry stock prices since Android came out. Wow, what a downer

Google Maps/Earth – probably one of Google’s most successful builds. MapQuest, Yahoo Maps maybe lost share (I don’t know) but they are still around

Google Weather – they put weather results in search, just like mortgage quotes. Weather.com is still a huge business

Google Finance – I think its like #8 most visited personal finance site, even though they promote the hell out of it.

By: Lead Confidential » Google, Lending Tree, and Mortech: The Past, Present and Future of Online Lead Generation

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:50:20 +0000

[...] there for leads. Google smells an opportunity to cut out a middle man, and increase margins.” LeadCritic wonders very aptly “What will stop Google from running their own lead generation strategies [...]