Take a look at what Google is doing, who its buying, what its building. Does it make any sense?

If you regard Google as an advertising company, it doesn’t make sense. But now consider that Google makes money from where it takes you. See how much clearer its strategy is?

You see. That’s the first rule that any strategist will follow. Don’t look at anything in isolation. Everything is a piece in a jigsaw. And the pieces are less important than the puzzle itself. So have I got you well and truly puzzled?

Nothing stands still and for Google, everything’s well and truly mobile

For a company making its living through clicks on text adverts, Cloud based productivity software, mobile phone operating systems, email filtering software, a failed bid for a mobile operating license in 2008 and the Nexus 1 phone just doesn’t seem to make much sense.

But think about how advertising revenue is derived. Google takes a tiny cut every time a consumer uses an advert to buy or visit somewhere. The company who actually provides the services take the lion’s share. Yes, I realise that’s a pretty obvious statement, for sure. How much money would Google make if it didn’t just point the way but took you there?

Maybe, you say, but that needs an infrastructure, something to carry you where you want to go and a network to carry you there.

What, something like a Cloud infrastructure, a mapping system, a mobile phone operating system, a mobile phone of its own and its own mobile network?

Now the strategy looks a lot clearer. Google’s corporate shopping trips look very much like this is where they’re headed. And while Google shrugged off its failure to secure an operating license in the mobile spectrum auction back in 2008 and indeed many saw it as a posturing exercise and no more, maybe people were wrong.

A shift, not a tear down

I’m not suggesting for a moment that Google’s abandoning advertising. It’s still waiting to get its offer for AdMob ratified as if we needed evidence of Google’s commitment to advertising.

But what I’m saying is that Google dominates a competitive market and isn’t complacent. It also knows that dominant players from one era rarely make it through to lead the New Era. Think IBM and see how even the invincible Microsoft is losing out on the Internet.

Ringing the changes

What I believe is that Google will be a major mobile player within the next 18 months. It knows that the PC market is dying, it knows the Internet is the future. It knows that notebook/laptop sales are plummeting and it knows that Smartphones and Netbooks are technology hot cakes.

And here’s a very cryptic clue to what Google might be doing with its mobile endeavours. Google’s new mobile phone is called Nexus 1. Nexus loosely means a link to a series of other connections. In other words, something that’s designed to take us somewhere else. A bit too tenuous a link, perhaps, or perhaps not.

A 2010 prediction

I hate the annual ego-massaging prediction fiasco so-called experts try to impress us with. And despite their almost universal failure to get it even close, their egos won’t let them stop. But here’s one from me, not based on some great foresight, but an observation of an emerging picture from strategy’s great jigsaw puzzle.

Google will be making a serious move into the mobile network market. soon. Very soon. But then again, that could be just another vacuous prediction…