Mark Simon at Search Insider has written a great post that draws on the recent eBay + Google debacle as an example of how Google’s business has changed:

As Google expands far beyond search — and into a vast array of online and offline businesses, from TV advertising to software applications — Google will need to think beyond the basic terms of Google services and users. It will need to think in terms of partnerships with a slew of different companies and organizations. […]

But what Google has failed to grasp is that eBay is different. Google can antagonize news organizations, book publishers, and the adult industry, because it doesn’t hold major partnerships with them. But eBay, as Google’s largest advertiser until last week, was a true partner. And offending partners doesn’t make for good business.

Simon goes on to talk about other areas of the Google universe in which partnerships like eBay’s are becoming increasingly important. It’s a great read and it brings to light an even bigger issue that Google is no-doubt going to start running into more and more.

Because of its position in search, Google has enjoyed a fairly unchallenged existence so far. But that existence has created an arrogant, do-it-alone company that throws its weight around to get what it wants. For the most part, that policy has worked fairly well.

But it won’t work forever. Eventually, when enough users and enough potential business partners have had enough, Google will quickly see its weight start to mean less and less. You can only irritate so many eBays before your business is severely impacted.

Traditional advertising isn’t a fan of Google. Media companies aren’t, either. Throw eBay into the mix and you’ve got millions (possibly billions) of dollars that are going to spent on advertising elsewhere. And as eBay was able to show, their Google traffic wasn’t really impacted by the move to pull their AdWords account.

So what does it mean for Google? Exactly what Mark Simon said:

And so a decade after it began, Google can’t afford to act as a lone player anymore. If it does, we might see a lot more partners than eBay jumping ship.