All the world's a platform

If you add every small business in the world - and Google is thinking that way - you can sum up Google's ambitions as this: the company would like to provide a platform that mediates supply and demand for pretty much the entire world economy. As Schmidt put it: "The sum of [Google's potential] market, if you include the large and small companies throughout the world, is the world's gross domestic product." So Google is angling to become the de facto marketplace for global commerce. That's big, but is it big enough to fulfil the expectations for it?

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