muganda wrote:@Djinn, actually the question was posed (as written) in the Cover Page of Fortune available in bookstands.
The argument was that if growth in Search was a thing of the past, for Google to maintain its position (as opposed to becoming a laggard like Microsoft, Yahoo) it needs a new game changer...
Realise Google has made 99% net profit from the same thing since 2001. The same can't be said for Apple/Microsoft etc. But on a positive note, it did take a whole 5 years before they learnt they could make money from Search anyway.
Google made 99% of profit from adwords and adsense which have been linked to all their websites from gmail to search to their blogs and anything google. They need all the websites to make that money.
They do not need to re invent the wheel but they are making the wheel smaller through the android. That is going to maintain and increase their revenue.
Another reason why google is no where near dead is tha barage of useful things you can do with google. Research using google scholar, look up books on google books, use google sketch instead of autocad, directions use google maps and the list goes on. Google is so ingrained in our live you wont know what to do with out it. It is similar to microsoft office.
Then their is the cloud computing since they are so good at everything you can trust them with whatever your company does. They already have the application your company uses.
I think the small bits and pieces that google apart from the search all have the potential of being the next big thing or for launching their next big thing. Example google talk that was linked to my gmail is so much better than skype that i now rarely use skype and im always on talk and making calls to states cellphone and landline is free free free. I've switched from skype to google talk because of gmail.