Those that know me well know that on the short list of thing I’m keenly interested in other then internet marketing are historic preservation, architecture, historic neighborhoods, sustainable communities, new urbanism and such. So my interest is piqued when I see one reflected in the other.
I just read a great post by Aaron Wall about Google, data acquisition and the impact on competition and the broader “online” community.
In the tangible world, one of the things that trouble me about big-box retailers is the impact they have on small independent retailers, neighboring historic downtowns and the broader “community” in which we live. Lowest price product and homogeneity at the expense of diverse, unique, viable and yes, green [ for another day 
] downtowns. No luddite I. I work to make a habit of being an “early adopter” as much as I can manage.
What brought this to mind was a parallel in Google’s growing domination of online markets by data capture > price competition > effective elimination of previously viable online marketing/advertising/service providers.
Free market, sure. A better product, likely true as well. By-the-way I say this as a raving Google fan. I love and use Chrome, aps, docs, calendar, wave, manymoon and on and on and on. That said, I can appreciate the difficulty many online companies have when Google decides they want to enter a market and provide a competing service often times for FREE. I know, I use a lot of their free services I used to pay others for.
Once upon a time I managed the online marketing relationships for the single largest online marketer within it’s vertical. While there Amaz** wanted to partner with us. I thought it a bad idea. Incremental sales in exchange for our customer and product sales data. Incremental sales for as long as the relationship was mutually beneficial in exchange for giving away the secret sauce, which is forever. We’d essentially be teaching a very large potential competitor our business by giving them access to our data. Thankfully the deal never happened, IMO.
For Google, gaining that data from those they touch = gaining the secret sauce with which they then compete. Evil, no I don’t think so. Free market, yeah I suppose. Google = better, cheaper services, likely true as well.
I’m just sayin’…
