The Economist has this week a great leader and briefing on Google, its exponential growth, business model, culture and future challenges as it becomes more and more a monopoly on its own right.

Google's business model is assumed to be based on servicing as much of its customer needs as possible, to store the information, datamine it and generate healthy profits through advertising. Incremental cost is close to zero thanks to the "cloud" architecture, though one could argue YouTune or DoubleClick were not free. Hence the need to expand into new services such as email, payments, navigations, office applications, etc... The more your customers remain in this "virtual" walled garden, the more you know about them and can monetize them.

Issues arise when people - and politicians - get wary about privacy, and that the need to expand means conflicting with even more industries/companies, e.g. media companies, Microsoft in software, banks in payments, telecom operators in internet connectivity, etc...

I am really looking forward to seeing how things unfold for Google. They did benefit so far from a perfect storm - smart people, weak competition, booming advertising market - and were impressive in executing their strategy and achieve a $160bn market cap. Curious to see how they would face some downturns - e.g. bearish advertising market, brain exodus, antitrust reviews, copyright lawsuits....

eMarketer recently published worlwide numbers for internet usage and penetration. Though the usual suspects remain in the top spots - US, Japan, Korea, UK, France, Scandinavia - the most interesting insight is the rise of emerging markets in the rankings. China is expected to become the largest internet market by the end of the year - as it already is for mobile telecommunications. Brazil and Mexico numbers confirm an active internet base in Latin America - just in case you haven't been on Orkut recently. India is also expected to grow exponentially - as is currently the case for mobile - and should get in the top 5 fairly soon.

It will be interesting to see how this change of user demographics will impact the internet, its format, content and language - fair to say that so far it is a mainly Western English thing.

UPDATE: Palm finally announced last Tuesday - via CEO Ed Colligan on the official blog - that the Foleo was cancelled and that the company was focusing all its resources on delivering the next generation of hardware and software ! Great news, welcomed by everybody, including Treo fanboys. Nobody had really understood the value of this product, wrong concept at the wrong time, especially while at the same time Apple shows the way forward with the functionalities of the iPhone....

Is it wake up call for Palm ? Engadget had done an amazing piece - "Dear Palm: it's time for an intervention" - highlighting key issues and potential solutions. I particularly loved the device design evolution - below - showing that basically, it was more of the same for the last 3 years !

Let's hope Ed and al deliver on turning Palm round!

I hesitated a bit before sharing my views on that but, as Palm announced some layoffs this week while almost everybody is getting absolutely crazy about the launch next week of the most awaited (smart-)phone of all times, fair to say that things look rather grim for Palm. Palm had for a long time been the symbol of innovation and almost single-handedly invented the markets for PDAs and smartphones - of course I am biased as a former owner of the Palm V and Treo 650 - but several management mistakes, the loss of their design flair and obviously the emergence of strong competitors are slowly bringing the company into oblivion.

It is now easy to see some of the wrong strategic decisions such as:
(a) not immediately embracing the smartphone market - and still producing PDAs nowadays....
(b) spinning off the OS side (Palm Source) and hence the core comparative advantage so that the Palm OS has not really evolved over the last 4 years and Palm had even to get Windows Mobile on board to remain in line with market expectations
(c) missing to understand the value of Push Email before (and even after for a while) RIM made it its bread-and-butter business
(d) not adjusting to the competitive pressure of the mobile market where players such as Nokia or Samsung release at least a dozen phones each year, so that the Treo's design and functionalities quickly became outdated
As things went south, rumour has it that the company was up for sale and that several potential bidders (Nokia and al) had a look but preferred not to act....

Then the first big blow was the release of the Foleo at the D-Conference, a kind of low-specs $500 ultraportable. Fair to say that people did not really get it, even Palm's enthusiasts!

Let's see how the last attempt to save the company by bringing in a PE shop - almost paying them actually to get 25% share via a complex financial structure where Palm pays other shareholders close to $1bn - and innovation talent via the former iPod's guy Rubinstein. I fear it is however too late...