商业报道:谷歌的生财之道（在线收听）

Google: Growth beyond search 2:45

The tech giant generates the majority of its profits from search. Where will it turn to become a diversified company?

Do you think that Google won't be able to escape going forward? One is that when you hire so many people, they can’t all be Rhodes Scholars and genius of other sorts, and the other problem is that it will be extremely difficult for any Google employee to make anywhere near the kind of wealth, that the early Google employees made. It’s just not possible in a company with 19,000 people to make a hundred million dollars, and so, the people who are truly motivated by money or who have an idea but they think it’s going to be the next Google are going to have no choice but to leave Google to pursue their dreams.

You know it’s funny to think about the challenge that Google faces because it has been so successful, because it’s so profitable, but the fact of the matter is that Google really only has one revenue stream, that this is a very sensitive topic around Google, because they know that mature, great companies have a diversified revenue stream, they have multiple products, they have multiple hits, and so Google is doing a lot of things, it owns YouTube, it’s trying to do advertising for radio and for television and for newspapers, it’s trying to get into this plate advertising. So far, none of these things have worked in a big way, now that doesn’t mean that Google won’t have some hits at some point, it also doesn’t mean that Google is going to run into financial trouble anytime soon. As a matter of fact, it’s extremely unlikely that that will happen. But at some point, and I can’t tell you when, they will need to have other products that produce billions of dollars of revenue the way search advertising does, and they are very aware of that.

The working on a handful of things that some of which already are producing money just not serious money in the Google sense, so for example, Google has a series of products called Google LABS, which are online versions of a lot of the products that Microsoft has like word processing and spreadsheets and email program, that’s a multi hundred million dollar business for Google right now, but that’s nothing compared to the similar business that Microsoft has that they are emulating, Google also is working on providing open software for social networking sites, it’s doing something very similar called Android, which is a software for cellular phone carriers. The goal in both cases is to try to get this broad community of people using Google software so that they can then feed those people into Google’s advertising engine. These are big initiatives, there are multi-year initiatives, and it’s simply too soon to say if this will turn into the kind of financial rewards, that Google has reaped for its advertising products so far.

IT巨头Google的大部分收入来源于搜索服务。那么，它将怎样转变成一个多元化的公司呢？

你是否认为Google难逃改革的命运呢？一方面，公司雇佣了许多员工，他们不可能每个人都是高级学者或者其他方面的天才。另外一个问题是，Google的雇员在其他地方不可能创造出像早期雇员创造出的那么多财富。一个拥有19，000名员工的公司不可能创造出数亿美元的财富，那么，有些人可能正的为钱所激励，或者有想法，但是他们认为未来的Google会完全不同，他们没有其他选择，不得不离开Google，到其他地方最求梦想。

你知道，想到Google面临的挑战可能会觉得很有趣，因为它做地非常成功，收入非常高。但是实际上，Google的收入来源非常单一，Google内部对这一话题非常敏感，因为他们都知道，一个成熟的，大型的公司都有多样化的收入来源，都有多种产品，涉及多个领域。所以Google做了很多方面的努力，他们兼并了YouTube，他们希望为电台电视和报纸做广告，试图进军平面广告领域。目前为止，这些努力都没有产生太大作用。这并不意味着Google不会有大的突破，也不意味着将进入财政困境。实际上，这种状况极不可能发生。但是，从某种意义上将，他们迟早会需要其他产品，像搜索广告业务一样创造数十亿美元的收益，他们非常清楚这一点。

Google进行了各方面的努力开发了一些新产品，其中一些产品也创造了一些收益，但是对Google来说没有什么意义。比如Google有一些列产品，叫做Google LABS，是许多产品的网络版本，就像微软的词语处理，电子表格和电子邮件类似。这些项目目前已为Google LABS创造了数亿美元的收益，但是与微软类似的业务不可相提并论。Google还在努力为一些社会服务网络提供免费软件，这类似于微软为手机用户提供的Android。这两个案件的共同目的是希望更广大的人群使用Google，以使公司可以供养广告搜索引擎的员工。这些都是很大的创新，几年来的创新，要说这些项目能不能转化成经济收益还为时尚早。