Google - the new Borg, or the first true web brand?
When I worked at Digital, people joked about being assimilated by the Borg, meaning they were going to work for Microsoft.
Well, I went back to dustbag.co.uk to order more vacuum bags, and found that the original merchant system had been replaced by Google Checkout. The process was very smooth, automatically picking up my Google account, adding credit card details, and then moving to a full checkout. The process was simple, quick and elegant. All the Google brand values (including minamilist design) applied.
Is this the start of true web brands? By that I mean a brand that appears in many places on the web, not just the brand’s own store. Google This and Google That appear all over the place now. The closest before that was Amazon affiliates, and that only really happened on the smaller sites. Even massive publishers use Google AdWords.
Interestingly Google tends to get between the consumer and the originator brand. My dust bag order confirmation e-mail comes from Google Checkout - not from dustbag.co.uk, whose identity has just vanished. Google giveth - I used Google to find the site in the first place; Google taketh away - the receipt appears to come from them.
Similar things happen when mobile operators “partner” with Google. The operator brand vanishes, and even if they share shavings of pennies off the ad revenue, the Google brand prevails.
