If I had a million dollars, and like 5 years of leeway.
I would be building a “Google clone”. Yes, really…
I would build a search engine, email, cloud drive, docs, slides, office apps, photos, meeting app and even a video sharing site. Everything. Make my own version of them all.
Why? Well, you could blame it on “uninformed optimism”, but while we have all thought of Google as unbeatable, and that they’ve grown out of reach, I think there are some cracks on the wall already.
Point number one: GOOGLE is now basically “evil”, they are now the leviathan they set out to disrupt when they started. With every new policy, Google is losing goodwill and trust from certain partners and several quarters amongst the public.
Second point: GOOGLE is huge globally, which is true, but some recent thinking sessions and the subsequent number crunching I followed up with showed me that the market untapped by Google might even be bigger than what they’ve captured so far.
I think we might have been distracted by the size of Internet Giants like Google that we fail to see the bigger picture.
For example, Facebook boasts of having 1.908 Billion people, which is mind-blowing. Simply amazing. But, BUT the stats say there are 7.9 Billion people on God’s earth.
So, HYPOTHETICALLY, if you were ready to think outside the box, you could build your own social media platforms and reach 6 Billion people Facebook and their family of apps are yet to reach. Hypothetically.
If I wanted to be a bit more realistic, I could point at a company like ZOHO and show that while you might not get a billion users for your own version of email, productivity and meeting apps, you would be doing well even if all you have are a few million users.
…and while we might chalk up the success of TikTok to the notorious Chinese philosophy, I think TikTok making an impact in North America and recently, Africa shows us that really, anything is possible.
Overall, this might sound a bit crazy, and that would be a fair assessment, but all great ideas usually look crazy initially.
If I had a million dollars, I would be cloning Google.
Yes, I clone first, get it working, and then we can begin to innovate on top of it. I learnt from my failures over the past 10 years or so that the first step is to copy and replicate what works before you innovate the already working system in your control.
This is the time to build up new “Internet Giants”. We can start with cloning Google.
