Google is Killing the Small Business; IBM’s Market Cap Passes Microsoft’s After 15 Years

Google is Killing the Small Business and Giving Them Little Hope to Compete Online

The Internet is huge. Most people can agree on that at this point. But most people don't realize how big it is in relation to the global economy. That's what a new McKinsey report, released this morning at the eG8 Forum, looks at. And it turns out, the Internet is a huge driver of economic growth. Internet as a sector is about 3% of GDP, or bigger than agriculture or energy, and represents over 20% of economic growth in the past 5 years, and growing. For every job that the Internet destroys, 2.6 new net jobs are created. The whole report is downloadable as a 50-odd page PDF here, but we've pulled out the best charts for you. They're fascinating. - The Internet Is 20% Of Economic Growth, Business Insider, May 24, 2011

May 18, 2011

Danny DeMichele - Google was built by the small business. To this day, most of their profits come from the aggregate of hundreds of thousands of small businesses that have small marketing budgets. Big businesses make up about 20% of their revenue. So given this, why on earth are they favoring big businesses, and screwing the little guy when it comes to organic search traffic? How are they doing this? By penalizing small businesses when they try to compete organically with the big guys.

Google is in control of over 60% of online e-commerce transactions. If you are not ranked on the first page of Google for your primary keywords, and you are a small business, you have little chance of being successful online. Without organic rankings, it will be near impossible to be profitable. The problem is, according to Google’s webmaster guidelines, you cannot really do anything that will give you a competitive edge over anyone. You are supposed to only do what is natural.

“Build your site and your marketing campaign to the user, the rankings will come.”

That is completely false, if you are a small business.

The highlighted tactic that Google “forbids” you to do is aggressive link tactics. You see, getting inbound links from other relevant sites still account for 60-70% of Google’s algorithm (Pagerank) weight, and if you want to rank for anything, you need a robust linking profile. Simply put, without links, you don’t rank. And as I stated before, if you don’t rank, you probably are not making any money.

They claim that website owners simply need to build good content which users will like. This will be enough for people to want to link to you, which Google will pick up on. This is great in Google fantasy land, but to compete with the ever growing link profiles of large companies, spending millions a year on a good PR campaign, it wouldn’t matter if you wrote a Nobel piece prize winning novel, you still wouldn’t be able to compete.

So the only way to combat this is to either come up with $250k+ yearly PR campaigns for your business or to violate Google’s ever changing, strict SEO policies. Most businesses have no choice, and they have to do the latter.

So the small business is screwed no matter what:
1. They abide by the rules and don’t get ranked
2. They violate the rules and risk being out of business any day Google decides to drop them from their index for being smart entrepreneurs and trying to compete in their marketplace.

Google having laws that prevent small businesses from competing is crazy. These laws are ridiculous and to think that you need to abide by them is even more ridiculous. Who the hell is Google to decide who is going to be successful and who is going to go out of business? Guerrilla marketing has been around for years. Google shouldn’t be able to decide who can and who cannot be aggressive in the marketing of their business.

To sum this all up into one neat, concise sentence. Google is favoring big companies by not allowing little companies to get aggressive enough to match their natural link profiles. This is flat our wrong. I am normally not in favor of government regulations, but because Google does control online commerce, they should not be able to decide whether a small business wants to market their business, and succeed online.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

IBM’s Market Cap Passes Microsoft’s After 15 Years

May 23, 2011

Epoch Times - International Business Machines (IBM) rose past old competitor Microsoft Corp. in market capitalization for the first time since April 1996, marking the latest milestone in the hardware and software giant’s recent surge.

IBM, which raised its 2011 earnings guidance in April, has been getting strong demand for its software and services recently.

The multinational technology company ruled the computer world for decades until it hired the small, unknown Microsoft in the early 1980s to provide an operating system for its upcoming personal computers, the IBM PC.

While “Big Blue” paid a one-time fee of $50,000 for the operating system, Microsoft’s Bill Gates did not transfer the copyright to IBM. As the operating system spread to other hardware vendors, Gates broke through into industry dominance, while IBM became relegated to a hardware manufacturer that could not keep up with the software technology revolution.

By the end of 1999, Microsoft’s market value was three times that of IBM’s.

However, since 2000, investors have looked beyond Microsoft’s operating system and Office suite and began eyeing younger competitors such as Google Inc. and Facebook, which have been taking full advantage of the rapid rise of the Internet and cloud computing.

Along with many PC users converting to Apple products, Microsoft's stock has suffered in the past decade.

Meanwhile, IBM sold off its PC group and ThinkPad brand to Chinese manufacturer Lenovo, and has since rebranded itself as a specialist in business software, servers, and consulting in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology, making a resurgence after decades of running in the shadow of Microsoft.

IBM had a market value of $203.5 billion at the end of the day Monday, compared to Microsoft’s $201.1 billion, according to Reuters. Neither companies comes close to Apple’s market value at $308.3 billion.