I admit, it DID wonder me for a bit, but when I read a piece today on Google may be trying to buy Twitter I thought about this for a moment.

I use most of the Google Services via a different client. For example Thunderbird to get my email, iCal to syn with calendar etc.

What this means is: I hardly ever see any of Googles advertising…. And yet, they seem to make shitloads of money. How do they do that?

The answer is actually rather simple, and I had it almost 15 yeras ago, at a time when the Internet didn’t really exist for most people, Online CompuServe and AOL rules the roost, with local BBS’ dotting the landscape and a little startup named MSN tried to set itself up to challenge the incumbent.

Back then, the news broke that Microsoft would include Internet Explorer (3) with their new OS instead of having to wait for people to go and find a copy (on floppy disks) of the Netscape Navigator.

This news caused some heated debate in some of the CompuServe forums I was on. My predication back then was that Netscape was done for. With a webbrowser installed nobody would go and try and find the Netscape version. I was ridiculed, laughed at etc. But in the end I was right. Netscape went under, IE took it’s place.

So what does that have to do with Google? Simple. Like IE being included in the OS made it easy to access the web without installing anything else, so are Google Services.

Everybody has a webbrowser installed, quite a many even Mozilla. It allows them access to all of the Google Services. Sure, they can install an email client etc. and access the system without the ads, but most people don’t know that they can do it or how to do it.

Like Microsoft pried on the average user who couldn’t be bothered to install Netscape, so does Google bank on the laziness / inability of it’s customers to configure a simple email client. Like Microsoft, their bet is good.

Google still has Geek cache, out of a variety of reasons that have very little to do with how Google behaves, more about it’s image. But Geeks aren’t the main user of Google’s Services. It is the average person who could never, ever, manually configure their computer to go onto the Internet.