Many of us take it for granted that Google will continue to be the most dominant company on the Internet in five years. And if not Google, then the title will go to one of its close rivals: Yahoo or Microsoft. But perhaps the world’s bias toward hulking corporations with massive revenues and profits closes our eyes to Google’s most formidable – and most undervalued – long-term competitor. Yes… Wikipedia!
Below are five reasons that Wikipedia’s business model is more sustainable in the long-term than… dare I say it… Google’s!
1. Wikipedia Has Almost No Overhead
Wikipedia has a single employee and, according to founder Jimmy Wales, pays about $5,000 a month in bandwidth costs for roughly 1.6 billion page views per month. Thus, all of the company’s administrators, moderators, and contributors are unpaid volunteers. With so little overhead, Wikipedia has maximum flexibility to incorporate changing technologies and changing needs of the populous, as the company continues to grow.
Google is a Hulking Corporation with Lots of Overhead
Google has thousands of employees and stratospheric costs for hardware, data center, R&D, and human resources. Though the company currently supports its cost structure with healthy profits in Internet search advertising, what happens if their search or advertising technology gets left behind? Then it still has a tremendous cost structure to support, and less flexibility to make required changes for continued growth.
2. Wikipedia Is a Non-Profit Company
Wikipedia’s obligations are to you – and that’s it!! The company isn’t hamstrung by obligations to advertisers, investors, current or future partners, or the whims of the public market. Thus, when it chooses a strategic direction – whatever it is – it’s likely to be one that has the best interests of people at heart… rather than one that serves its business interests.
Google Has Obligations to the Public Markets
To date, Google has exceeded all quarterly profit targets since going public, and so hasn’t faced the scrutiny and second-guessing that comes with falling short of profit targets… the kind that currently beleaguers Yahoo. But now that Google is a public company, like it or not, it will have to prioritize short-term profits (its obligation to investors) over generating real value (its obligation to consumers). Competing obligations have historically slowed innovation in tech companies, and opened the door to smaller, more agile, more risky, and less entrenched companies.
3. Wikipedia Drinks From the Fountain of Innovation – Shared Knowledge
Wikipedia believes in and relies on the collective intelligence of its large community to provide a better and more comprehensive source of knowledge than even the most established encyclopedias. All of the more than two million articles on Wikipedia are written, debated, edited, and re-edited by people who care deeply about creating a free, comprehensive, and openly available knowledge source! By giving people the power to create and contribute, Wikipedia taps into a practically unlimited workforce that spans the globe and believes heartily in its mission.
Google Drinks from the Fountain of Stagnation – Secrecy!
Much has been written about Google’s corporate culture – it is said to encourage significant innovation… and that keep those innovations tightly guarded. So whereas Wikipedia has unlimited innovative capacity because creation is shared and debated with whoever is interested, Google is limited by the square footage of its buildings and the girth of its checkbook. By encouraging a culture of secrecy, Google ignores a burgeoning cultural need for transparency and understanding, leaves untapped a large pool of willing helpers, ultimately restricting its growth.
4. Wikipedia Takes the Best From Democracies, Aristocracies, and Monarchies
Wikipedia engages in democratic knowledge collection by encouraging anyone to participate in the creation of articles. It also allows anyone to recommend edits or deletions to articles. But though anyone can contribute, some contributions are valued more than others – as happens in an arisotocracy. Wikipedia users with track records of unbiased, intelligent writing, editing, and commentary usually enjoy more clout in group decision-making. This enables their voices to outweigh the voices of, say, eighteen skinheads who want to delete an article about the Holocaust. And if, for whatever reason, Wikipedia gets “infiltrated”, and their open structure is used to promote unconstructive or commercial agendas (e.g. racism, bigotry, hatred… or undeserved brand praising), founder Jimmy Wales can use his monarch-like powers to either change the rules or structure as needed (though his power can’t be abused, or the thousands of Wikipedia volunteers would lose interest).
Google Takes Its Cues from Dan Brown’s Opus Dei
Google’s employees write algorithms that determine relevancy of information. Those algorithms make some information “relevant” and demote other information to back pages (or no pages at all) for reasons that are only known to its mathematicians. And though Google’s search results are significantly tainted by commercial interests and/or subversive marketers, it does not give consumers a hand in moderation and enabling more relevant search results. Such a refusal to divulge information, such as search result algorithms, as well as a refusal to give consumers a say in determining relevancy makes the company vulnerable to a more agile and open-minded Wikipedia.
5. Wikipedia is a Glass House (with Super-Strong Glass)
Wikipedia’s organization and processes are naked to the world. If other websites want to use Wikipedia’s accumulated collective knowledge, they have an invitation to take what they want. If software engineers want to enhance Wikipedia’s core structure, they can tinker with the code all day long. If startup businesses (like mine) want to learn how Wikipedia’s organization encourages and enables a truly efficient self-policing culture, they can learn away! Wikipedia understands that to make the world a better and more knowledgeable place, it is most responsible and effective to open up knowledge for the whole world to weigh in on!
Google is a Brick House (with No Windows)
Google’s organization and processes are, as we’ve noted, mostly tightly-guarded secrets. Google lets the world know what it wants the world to know, and nothing more. If other websites want to use Google’s accumulated knowledge… they can use Google’s advertising program. If software engineers want to enhance Google’s core structure, they can tinker with the few things available in Google Labs or apply for a job. If startup businesses (like mine) want to learn how Google enables better searching… good luck! Google is concerned with making Google a more knowledgeable place – and by extension, hopefully, the world! And though, to date, Google’s work has significantly benefited the world, I have significant doubts about whether an army of a few thousand highly paid workers can in the long term out-gain, potentially, an army of potentially millions of dedicated souls!
Conclusion
Though we’ve shown that Wikipedia’s business model may be more sustainable than Google’s in the long term, it may also be limited in scope. Right now Wikipedia’s mission is very simple: make knowledge free and accessible to the world. Can Wikipedia roll out a free e-mail service? They shouldn’t want to. But can Wikipedia take on Google in terms of search? Perhaps not at this juncture… but in the future, as it continues to organize and grow, maybe. The Wikipedia model is, I believe, better at producing really large-scale and useful data sets, and ultimately that’s what’s needed for a good search engine!
This feels rather like comparing apples and oranges. They’re both fruit (Google and Wikipedia are both ‘Internet companies’), they provide nutrition (both provide information), but paths diverge from there.
Google has many business ventures that have nothing to do with http://www.google.com, including hardware development… it has many sections, like an orange. While Google states one of their goals is to organize the world’s information, I think they also recognize that isn’t really their ‘business’ - the way they make their money. They create all of these other services and products and sell advertising as a means to that end.
Wikipedia is a vast, user-edited encyclopedia of dubious accuracy, which provides great recreational reading and possibly good launching points for research, but isn’t accepted as a reference by most academic institutions. You could call it an apple from the tree of knowledge, which may or may not be tainted.
The Internet public loves both, they both serve needs in a manner that is respectable. There is no need to line them up and try and declare them competitors. Perhaps it would have been better to argue that Wikipedia might be more long-lived, without using the word ‘competitor’ - although really, Google is going to be around for a long time to come, if only in the dictionary.
Dan, you really don’t like Google, do you?
I agree with your general characterization of Google and Wikipedia, but so far the two organizations have been more symbiotic than competitive. For starters, Google is not much in the business of generating content - Google doesn’t even do a great job of documenting its own products, leaving us to guess, for example, all the syntax allowed in Google Calculator (etc.). On Wikipedia, every functional feature of Wikipedia itself gets documented in ever-increasing detail, because whenever someone figures something out that isn’t already in the online help, they can just add it.
Jimbo Wales said something along the lines of how Google needs Wikipedia to help insure that the Internet “does not suck.” Google has been elevating Wikipedia articles in Google Search results, on the assumption (usually an accurate one) that the Wikipedia article about random subject X will seem better to most users than random Web pages about random subject X. Speaking for myself, I greatly prefer to start by reading the Wikipedia article on a new subject than random Web pages, because the random Web pages have inconsistent formatting, and most make me feel as if I’m falling into the middle of an ongoing conversation. In contrast, the Wikipedia article has a consistent layout, it defines and introduces its topic in a predictable way, and it links to human-selected sites for further information.
Wikipedia helps Google Search work better, by giving a kind of “known quantity” for Google to return first for many queries. This in turn encourages more people to use Google Search more often, driving ad clicks. Google’s business model depends on the Internet not sucking, and Wikipedia helps the Internet suck less.
While Wikipedia does have a nominal workforce numbering in the millions, only a small fraction make extensive contributions (a core group of “serious” volunteers roughly comparable in size to Google’s workforce). This is not to downplay the millions of people making small corrections and additions from their areas of unique expertise, but to show that it’s hard to compare one Google employee to one Wikipedia volunteer. For Wikipedia to compete directly with Google, Wikipedia would need many times more volunteers, because Google employees are working for Google full-time, and Wikipedia volunteers work in their spare time.
Wikipedia does not try to operate like a business. There are no deadlines, only very weak mechanisms to pressure people to do things they don’t want to do, no guarantees, and so on. Google’s work environment is more relaxed than that of the traditional business, of course, but it’s hard to imagine a world in which nobody feels like paying money to get a certain result by a certain date. There will probably “always” be some demands worth paying for that won’t be filled soon enough by volunteers. Indeed, so far most open-source projects have not really innovated, but instead imitated and improved upon existing commercial products. Wikipedia, for example, is like an open-source Encyclopaedia Britannica.
I’d say what Wikipedia does better than anybody else is skillfully organize vast numbers of geographically remote volunteers, most of whom never have and never will see each other in physical proximity. Even Google, for all its technical prowess, still relies on the pre-Information Age model of employees physically commuting to physical offices each day. Given that transportation technology depends almost entirely on petroleum, and petroleum is running out, that means transportation will only continue to get more expensive, while computers and telecom continue to get cheaper. Therefore, the future belongs to businesses which tie their fate to Moore’s Law instead of to Hubbert’s Curve.
And even though Wikipedia’s leader is personally fond of jetting frequently around the world to hobnob with people, he’s more of a figurehead than a representation of how the real work gets done. Wikipedia relies less on physical travel to generate and move information than any business I have heard of. That factor alone positions Wikipedia to thrive in the future world where virtual mobility must displace physical mobility to an ever-increasing degree. In contrast, every traditional business must struggle to overcome its obsolete traditions, left over from the days when fossil fuels were cheap and seemingly inexaustible.