Not quite yet, however there is some chat about the idea from Read Write Web. They put this idea up as the next area Google might head into. They are probably right, but it won’t happen for some time. History tells us why. When Google does it will be via acquisition.
Google is about SCALE!
Google likes to sell into big, fat, flat markets. They like to cover many countries to create reach for the paying CMO type customers with advertising spend in hand.
Their history saw them head into search, then email, mapping and more recently office tools like documents which nearly everyone except die hard hand writers use. Accounting is niche in consumer market sense. Except! Personal tax and budgeting. Everyone needs to do their tax, and not everyone does it because it’s a hassle. So this would be where Google enters the market in my opinion – personal finance and budgeting.
This is a market depth exercise for them. It is about owning a massive share of the net by having web junkies hooked via free use, who love their stuff. Good on them for doing it, it benefits all.
This is about getting as many free or near free services out to as many people as possible. Then you can charge a little later and whooshka! You will then see the first multi-trillion dollar business on earth and write a post about it and link back to my blog
The big issue in taxation/business accounting is the legal, legislative, documentation and banking process differences across 100′s of countries. This stopped Microsoft from heading into the space for many years. As I’m sure it stopped Google.
A spreadsheet is universal, email is universal, accounting isn’t.
I always ask the question why is it that I’ve been working in this space since 1998 and not until 2006 did it start to getting hot? It’s because of the reasons mentioned above.
If your running strategy at Google and have endless cash to draw on for development why get into the tough markets early, do the easy sells and then hit the harder stuff later. This is the main reason I headed in SaaS accounting, I new everyone would be off doing easier stuff so I’d end up with very few competitors while I got a head start.
I didn’t know it at the time but some smarties wrote a book about that kind of strategy amongst others called the Blue Ocean Strategy (see advert).
Google (and anyone) is only ever one good deal away from changing their mind. I’m happy to have them prove me wrong if they buy Saasu.com
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