Google Cash
As Google heads for the market cap stratosphere the fact is that it has pretty much intorduced all the products which make much sense except one.
There is huge speculation in the webmaster forums about Google Wallet.
There is very little question that Google is going to introduce something which looks very much like PayPal. It is, after all, sending money to all those long tail adsense people - including, pray God, me - but that is just the start.
The last few Google product intros have been a bit lame. Blog search, sigh, online voice, already been done. But Google has one trick which almost no one else could pull off. It could introduce its own currency.
Google is the fifth most widely recognized brand in the world. If, tomorrow morning it beta lauched Google wallet it would very qucikly have several million people who would be delighted to dump PayPal - with its prissy little restrictions and life time bans, not to mention its fondness for cleaning your own personal bank account out - for a Google driven alternative. But why stop there?
At the moment there is a serious shortage of world currency. The US buck is wonderful but more than a little volatile what with the budget and trade deficits mounting up. The euro is simply sad as the french and germans blithely ignore the euro zone rules. China has lots of cash but it is being artificially depressed by the Chinese urge to export.
Now, pace Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, a universal world currency in private hands is actually a rather good idea. Especially if it was instantly convertible into the rest of the world’s currencies.
It would, however, need some sort of assurance that it would not be inflated by its owner. As it happens, both Alan Greenspan and Paul Volker are, more or less, on the market at the moment. either or both of these ex-Fed Chairman as the controller of the “Google” would reassure people that the boys would not simply run the servers day and night.
A Google currency would capture the reality of the largley borderless internet/IT world. Last night I sold a couple of text links - one to a chap in India, another to someone who, I think, lives in Spain. It didn’t matter because we could instantly transfer the dollars - at a price - via PayPal. The next step out would be to lose the USD as the medium of exchange and use the Google.
Money, after all, is nothing but information in a particular form. It tells people who is hot and who is not. It describes an asset profile and it delinates an income.
Old money - in the Rumsfeldian sense of old - described a world of objects, of atoms. New money needs to be able to define a world driven by bits, bytes and pixels. Who better than Google to offer an alternative way of counting?
Ian Welsh often suggests that the USD is finished and that at any second the currency of choice will be the euro notwithstanding the sagging nature of the economies which support it. I rather doubt he is right about the USD; but there is no reason at all that the euro should be the next best choice.
A Google would be a currency about the new world that the internet has invented. At the turn of the century in Canada banks issued their own currency. It was both Canadian and local to the areas that the banks operated in and its value reflected the relative strength and weakness of the banks which issued it.
Google has the opportunity to do much the same thing save that a Google would reflect the strength of the global economic sector which underpined it.
If a webmaster in Bangalore can hire a writer in Canada at ten Googles and hour there is no reason why he won’t so long as the people who come to his site are paying in Googles.
Keeping track would be a snap for Google. It already does keep track for the millions of sites which have adsense on their sites.
Having won the search wars it is time for Google to look for new worlds to explore. A virtual currency is just the sort of grand conception which has powered Google from the start.
Written by jay on October 25th, 2005 with 1 comment.
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