When you send that proposal and cannot get a response, understand that certain things are not based on pure product quality or do-no-harm competition. That Google Search spends about $26 billion yearly to secure the best seats in phones and browsers is a concern: “In a federal antitrust trial, a slide made public revealed that Google paid a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to secure its position as the default search engine on mobile phones and web browsers.” Apple possibly received $19 billion of that for the default placement on Apple devices.
Like I wrote in Harvard Business Review on Intel Inside campaign, and how the marketing genius who invented it might have done just as much as the engineers who wired Intel processors, the partnership lead in Google who closes these deals (locking the Apple world for Google) has provided core “innovation” in the success of Google just as the engineers who creates the search technology.
What is the message: do not neglect your commercial guys as one partnership can transform a business. Period, innovation happens in marketing and sales, not just in technology.
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As the trial continues, we’re learning that Google is a great partnership innovator, just as it is a good engineering one. Sure, the government does not like that. But the court will decide. But the lesson is clear: Google has not won purely on its technical strength; it has got a really great help from those “locks”, made possible by $26 billion yearly payments.
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These guys are very brutal. Google with its popularity still doles out truckloads of cash to secure front seats? Americans are something else. Something that could have probably still come to them without a hassle, but they didn’t want to take chances.
Building an enduring corporation goes beyond product engineering excellence, even your lobbying skills must be excellent too; nothing is ever less important at that level.