At TG Daily, Rob Enderle speculates at the possibility of Google entering the gaming market. The main reason he entertains this possibility is his opinion that the gaming marketplace is too confusing right now. He opines:
The gaming market is in a real mess right now.  We have 4 active game systems the Nintendo Wii, the Xbox 360, the PS3, and, not to forget, the PS2, which outsold all of the others last year. On the PC side, we have Windows XP games, Windows Vista Games, Flash-based games, and some folks are still porting to the Mac.
It is his opinion that there needs to be some white knight for the gaming industry that will come in and streamline the entire marketplace. The premise, at first, seems sound. If HP were to supply cheap hardware to take advantage of Google’s distributed cloud computing principles, the principle cost for gaming would be much lower. The $300-500 consoles would be a thing of the past. And cloud computing would save the gaming world.
I am tired of analysts wildly speculating that Google is going to enter X or Y marketplace and revolutionize everything. Were these analysts saying the same thing about Microsoft during their antitrust heyday? Were they saying, “You know what, Microsoft doesn’t have monopolies in enough markets. If they started selling coffee, they would definitely eliminate Starbucks.”
Let’s put aside, for a second, that cloud computing is really just a trend of the moment until Google proves otherwise. Let’s ignore that. Let’s look at the fundamental idea. Google should enter a marketplace in which the monopoly king of the 90s had to drop $4 billion just to compete. And now, there are articles questioning whether the XBox is past its prime. Now Google is supposed to wave its magic fairy wand and solve videogames? How has that worked with e-mail? Gmail is perhaps Google’s best product offering outside of its search, and even I consider it to be the best of the webmail options. If you look at their market share, you’ll see that they still aren’t even close to the top dogs in Yahoo! or Microsoft.
What would happen if Google entered the gaming space? If this Utopian future that Enderle has conjured up were to come to pass, Google would have an effective monopoly on the gaming market. (Not that this would ever happen because innovation in the gaming market revolves around competition, and, as Enderle pointed out with the Wii, such innovation sells very well.) Google already raised red flags with the antitrust police when they bought DoubleClick. What would happen if they actually entered games industry and dominated? They would be broken up like Ma Bell. The hammer would drop, and Google would effectively be a cloud corporation.
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