Going forward, Google will have its biggest challenge in dealing with Time's most famous person of the year, YOU. Why do I say this? Well in my opinion this mammoth of a company will find its greatest challenge in the future, and probably in their existence with your sense of security and privacy, as well as how you are being probed by a company.
This doesn't convince you? Let me illustrate an example that might give you an idea. As a digital business man/woman you're contracted by a growing company to help it "develop its business", and one of your ideas is to move IT operations to the cloud (email), with Google. How comfortable will you feel relying on a professional solution platform, that consistently revises your data and uses it actively. Do you think an older generation that is not used this will approve of you decision to let another person to be completely privy to what you and your customers share. Now apply this to your personal email, where potentially you have very personal information as well as credit card numbers and other small things you wouldn't want others to see.
You can ask yourself, why does Google do this, why probe around. Well the answer is easy, and they can't say it clearer, through the systematic analysis of your data they can (through their mythological algorithms) deliver contextual ads to you which might be of interest and more importantly increase their click through rate. A personal example; I recently booked a trip within Europe and while I received confirmation of it to my email, suddenly ads were appearing through my Google navigation of hotels in that exact same city. To my taste a little bit to personal...
It is true that now a days most digitally native people wouldn't actually mind this as much (as proven by a biased survey in my Digital Business specialization class) but I believe this will change as our life becomes even more mobile. All our interactions are becoming digital and mobile (in which Google will surely win, in my humble opinion) and we're being exposed more and more to digital probing. I would say I am overreacting, but another example might complete the loop on my story. Imagine your a Digital Native, and you really don't mind that your email and personal information (such as maybe personal finance documents) are being probed; then the digital September 11 happens. One security failure, one big PR disaster, when one person like you is completely exposed to the public, terrorist use this information to strike, credit card numbers are released or a case of corporate espionage. How do you feel now?
The point of all this is that Google has clearly shown in the past that they are experts in creating value for users and how they understand user experience. As well they have monetized this by advertisement, and are expanding to other sources, such as SaaS; they are very healthy monetarily. Albeit this they rely on knowing the customer intimately, and as time goes forward this becomes a wholly holistic view of the person, from the people they interact with to their location and financial information. This can spur discontent within the populace and rejection of their services to a certain degree where it has to be managed and dealt with (an idea is a pay for service "sans" all the revision of your data). This discontent can be brought to a tipping point through any major scandal which would become viral and raise people's awayness of how their are exposed digitally and increase opposition to such behavior by corporations. As said before, I believe that if Google continues in its current state of business it will continue to prosper, but I see a latent problem with users privacy and data security.
Unfortunately for this blogger, this is probably a told you so post, in which if Google properly manages the problem it will never become an issue, but if it explodes, I can certainly say I told you so...
A brief video from Google related to the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SCZzgfdTBo
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