Google was down for 5 minutes and some saw internet traffic dip 40%. No wonder Google is pushing for WebRTC.
It is a good time I was asleep at the time. Om Malik writes about Google’s outage earlier this week:
Google (not including its other properties) now accounts for nearly 25 percent of internet traffic on an average.
The impact and effect Google has over our lives cannot be understated. It starts with search, but from there goes to other domains. Until recently, the web included text interactions, images and video streams. Google has their properties around all of these mediums. Bidirectional interactions though were strictly textual in nature – no voice or video allowed. With this in mind, is it any surprise that Google “blessed” us with WebRTC? An open internet standard that enables adding the missing voice and video components.
It is free for all. We can do whatever we wish with it.
But there’s Google Hangouts, which eventually will be pure WebRTC I am assuming. Skype and other services are solid alternatives. And then if you read Nick Summers’ piece about Google+ being the social spine for Google, this sentence pops up:
I never planned to use Hangouts this extensively and I never asked for it to be baked into Google+, but now that it is – I don’t think I would ever choose or prefer to have them separated.
There are rumors about Helpouts (now live)– Google’s own experts market solution. While I don’t really see it happening, it does raise a question: what does Google have in store for the WebRTC ecosystem at large? Should we be content with having scraps of market share in obscure verticals because they are too small to Google? Do startups stand a chance in front of Google’s own plans for WebRTC-based services?
And what is the alternative? Not having WebRTC and needing to build everything from scratch on your own?
To Google, WebRTC is an obvious choice. If it didn’t exist, they would have invented it. Oh… but they just did.
I could be wrong, but I’ve always felt Google had developers and start ups at the core of their business. Google sets up technologies hoping that innovators will take them to the next level. We, therefore, are Google’s front men (and women). I believe this is highlighted more if you compare Google to Microsofts habits of marketing solely to the corporate players, where managers make decisions and not developers (at least not real ones) 😉
They compete differently than Microsoft, but they do compete.
If you were the CEO or CTO of LiveNinja or popexpert today – what would you do?
If tomorrow Google opens up TURN servers for free to all of us – what would XirSys do?
Hi Tsahi. I hope you’re doing well.
I believe XirSys will continue to be unique and offer value regardless of the outcome. 🙂
Good stuff. There is clearly an Internet+Mobile hegemony war going on between Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook (with a crowd of yahoos who would also like to play) where if you stand in the wrong place you will get trodden on. This is bigger but no different than the Oracle and SAP tussle in enterprise apps and Cisco versus many dwarves in networking. A company has to produce new unique and compelling value to avoid the giants in any space. Somehow, Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest managed to enter the seemingly crowded consumer social space and Salesforce, Box, Jive, Marketo and others are managing to find new traction in the supposedly settled enterprise apps area (and so, yes, some get acquired by the giants). I think the lesson for WebRTC-enabled innovators is: deeply understand your audience and use case and build real unique and defensible value. Just being a thin “look.. video” layer on top of the APIs is not going to be defensible and neither is easily commoditizable WebRTC IaaS.