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Yes ... it's Friday ... that wonderful day of the week again ... the day when some of us are lucky enough to be able to think about not working for the next couple of days. Sadly this week I'm not one of them.

Like many people in this industry I'll be working over the weekend ... perhaps not quite as hard as I do through the week but it's still work. Of course I could take the weekend off but we're only a few weeks away from Christmas and I'm definitely taking a week off to head over to the next state to visit family and friends during the Christmas week.

So this weekend I'm playing something of a long game ... work hard now so I can enjoy some time off in the future.

That made me wonder just how many of us play the long game with our business. How many of us aren't looking so much for instant success but rather for more success further down the track? I wouldn't look down on you if you were looking for success now rather than further into the future ... playing the long game can be a hard thing to do.

These days we have plenty of examples of big business playing the short game because they need to go on generating a return for their investors. Most investors want their money now ... not five or 10 years down the track ... and that's rather short-sighted because we have a perfect example of what happens when a company does play the long game.

And that example is a business that touches our lives ... and the lives of a very large percentage of the world's population ... every single day. Of course I'm talking about Google.

Before Google went public it was playing a very long game ... so long in fact that most of us missed what was happening. Just think about it for a moment ... Google started with the goal of cataloguing the world's information ... a noble goal but one that didn't produce much in the way of income in the short term.

Years later Google has a fairly tight grasp on what it set out to achieve and gradually it has become all but indispensable. People go to Google every day for the information that they need but Google hasn't quite finished with the long game ... because there's one more step that Google knows it has to take.

Adult webmasters who have been around for a few years understand that it's important to extract every cent they can from every person who visits their galleries and free sites. Many of us who were around years ago learned that we needed to keep our surfers on our sites for as long as possible. So we would keep moving surfers through images and galleries and ads until we were sure that we couldn't get them to spend any money.

Now the guys at Google aren't stupid but what they have been doing for all those years is getting people onto their site and then getting them off to sites and that's a poor use of the mega amounts of traffic they get every single day. Now I believe that Google is about to take that last step ... for them the long game that they've been playing all these years is all but over. Now I believe that we're about to see Google make far better use of that traffic.

Instead of sending people away they're going to keep as many people on their site as possible and only let them go when those people have put money into Google's pockets. They have the all the information they need so they don't have to send people off to other websites ... they can deliver the information right there on Google.

They don't have to send people who want to buy stuff off to other websites ... they can get merchants to sell their goods right there on Google and if you're a merchant and you don't want to cut Google in on the action then Google won't care. How will people find your online shop if Google doesn't show it to anyone?

And what if you are there on Google's front page selling your products but Google thinks your price is too high? If no one is buying what you're selling because of your price point then Google doesn't make any money from you so why should they even bother to list you anymore?

Google's new world is not going to be a pleasant place but each of us needs to think seriously about how we're going to survive in there because, whether you're playing the long or short game, Google will be the one who owns the game.