Fool.com: Google's Billion-Dollar Idea [Motley Fool Take] January 3, 2005
Now THIS is a billion dollar idea. Rather than sitting flat footed, waiting for the ads in the newspaper to have an effect, you could look at Google as dynamic demand generation. You have too many of x, you trigger an ad for x on Google. You have no more y, drop all your ads for y on Google. All tied in together to your systems. There's an elegance there that is difficult to overstate.
This is just the start though. There's a ubiquity to Google that I think a lot of people are missing. Remember, with ~1100 randomly sampled individuals, you're able to get a pretty good picture (95% accurate) of the US population as a whole. Mind you, that's truly random, and that's asking totally neutral questions, but that's the picture. If you increase the n, and reduce the amount of questions, you're able to get the same picture. Google roughly sees a hojillian people a day, but the sample is fairly biased. That said, if they saw x amount of people asking about laptops, or y amount of people asking about how to fix your basement using your patching trowel, and you could track those to an area, CompUSA or Home Depot would LOVE to know about it. Just-in-time the inventory request and simultaneously trigger an ad and you could have the extra items you need within a day or so, just as the people with the requests begin to associate your name with their need. It's quite remarkable.