Joe Duck

Google’s done it again.  After aquiring a company with a great service Google turns around and makes the service free to all users.  Tracy at Feedburner outlines the new plan.  Feedburner is one of the leaders in RSS feeds and their basic services were free.   Google is also making the Feedburner “MyBrand” service free allowing bloggers and podcasters a more robust promotion and distribution mechanism at no charge.

Google’s strategy appears very clear now - they’ll continue to expand search and free web services for users and publishers, and work to continue being the key monetization tool for websites through adsense and adwords.   This is a brilliant approach which stands in stark contrast to Microsoft’s history of developing robust but expensive applications and then seeking to control the market through very aggressive sales and business practices.

As the internet becomes the global network we’ll see the Google approach is increasingly powerful.    Microsoft is copying this with the LIVE effort, but that may be too little too late.     Yahoo’s efforts are very much in line with Google’s but they don’t have the market share in search to be as profitable as Google.    It will be very interesting to see how Yahoo’s new leaders Jerry Yang and Sue Decker strategize for the rapidly changing online environment.