Google creates an ecosystem of small "hybrids"

As the company's executive director, Eric Schmidt, says, Google’s goal is to “build an ecosystem” of many small companies, in the center of which is the giant Google. In such an ecosystem, no one remains offended, each has its own share of the profits. It seems that the smaller and more energetic objects in this system - the more Google likes it. About this sophisticated development strategy of the search giant writes Forbes .

Google has already crushed the entire search engine optimization industry. Representatives of this business now, in fact, work for the search engine as useful parasites.

However, Google wants more. The company's ambitious plans for world domination are directly related to the emergence of thousands of small web applications that feed on information flows from Google. These are the so-called "hybrids" (mashups). These are web applications of the most different purposes in which content Google through program interfaces is used. Here, this content is mixed with other content, resulting in a new, useful service. For example, a map of fish places in the US. Thousands of such hybrids have multiplied on the Internet, and dozens of new ones appear almost every day.

Google Maps is probably the most popular for creating hybrids. Over the past year, about 30,000 people have downloaded the program code to access the map service.
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Google’s strategy is not unique. The competitors go the same way: Yahoo , Microsoft , Amazon and eBay . All of them publish program code with which developers can embed an information flow from Yahoo or eBay into their own web application.

Even business-oriented hybrids are beginning to appear on the Internet — serious financial instruments. Google itself would never have mastered the creation of such services, it would simply not have enough resources for it. Here the Internet giant depends heavily on the developer community, and this is a mutually beneficial deal. Most hybrids created on the basis of Google, get advertising revenue through affiliate programs of the same Google.

The model by which Google “educates” developers is similar to the one on which Microsoft once worked. In this sense, it is very symbolic that some leading Microsoft programmers are now working at Google. For example, Mark Lucovsky (Mark Lucovsky), who has 16 years working at MS, now works at Google on software interfaces for independent developers (by the way, his departure at one time caused wild anger and mate from Steve Ballmer).

Mark Lukowski believes that the pace of development in the Google ecosystem is simply shocking. Ten minutes after the publication of the program code, thousands of developers have already downloaded it, and after a couple of days, the first commercial services based on this code appear: “In 2004 I wrote software for its release in 2013. Now we activate the functions and see what happens. In general, there is no cycle [of development], ”says Mark.