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Google Formula For Adding New Products

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the solid-diamond-fortress-in-california dept.

gpmac writes "Google executives attempted to demystify the search company's product decisions during presentations with Wall Street analysts on Wednesday. As Google Inc. has moved beyond Web search and into product areas as diverse as e-mail, photo-organizing software and mapping tools, one of the common questions for the company is how it decides where to devote resources. Looks like they are being a little more serious about it than their pigeon story would indicate."

9 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Beta as a part of branding, my foot by winkydink · · Score: 3, Insightful
    "Google itself was in beta for a very substantial number of years," said Page, who is president of products. "Part of our brand is that we under-promise and we over-deliver, and being in beta is part of that. It's part of our branding strategy."

    Translated, in case something should blow up, we want to wait as long as possible before not being able to say, "Hey, it's in beta. What did you expect?"

    --

    "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey

    1. Re:Beta as a part of branding, my foot by millwall · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's probably exactly what they mean. I've got no problems with it though. And I think they should have credit for not only saying it, byt also meaning it.

      I'm really glad that such companies do exist. I'm sick and tired with all comapnies that over-promise and under-deliver.

  2. 70-20-10 by de1orean · · Score: 2, Insightful

    interesting, but how will they deal with the inverse proportion of employee motivation?

    70% of employees will want to work on the 10% of stuff that is "truly interesting to us."

  3. Re:Why oh why won't it fly? by ovit · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Their is a crucial difference here.

    While google is certainly currently over priced, they're value is not 0. They have lots of revenue.

    Most of the dot bombs never had any real amount of revenue. The ones that did (ebay & amazon) are still around... Google will be around in 2007... Perhaps not at its current price, but it will be around...

    --
    hard core geek-ware
  4. Google has to many beta products at the moment by hsmith · · Score: 3, Insightful

    When are they going to actually finish something? Everything except for the standard search seems to be in beta. Are they going to produce anymore finished products anytime soon?

    1. Re:Google has to many beta products at the moment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      They don't need to.

      Most of the products you are referring to are already fully functional (even better than similar products). The symbol of beta is just so that... (fill in blank) The point is that it hardly matters. Program is compeletely functional, you've got a product. Calling it beta doesn't change that much.

      And of course, no program can ever be truly finished. We all know that.

    2. Re:Google has to many beta products at the moment by Fnkmaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually I think "beta" partially means "we are figuring out the business model right now". Like email - it's not that they are holding back on a wide release of GMail to add more features. They are just tweaking the profit model, and recognize that as part of that process they may be forced to modify functionality substantially.

      By keeping it in "beta" they can change the featureset or tweak to satisfy advertiser demand and have a cover-your-ass story just in case they change things ("sorry, that wasn't a finished product you were using, it was just a beta test").

      Once they have a firm idea of how they are going to make money off of the product and have added advertising into the mix fully, it seems to come out of beta.

  5. 20% of google employee's time... by jxyama · · Score: 4, Insightful
    is dedicated to working on projects he/she wants to work on, completely unrelated to his/her core job function.

    i assume this means you get to take one day a week to brainstorm and work on whatever sounds cool.

    when you have a collection of fairly bright and competent people and provide them with computational and other resources and give them some free time, you get some cool stuff.

  6. Re:Not many companies work that way by jthayden · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't really pay a whole lot of attention to this stuff, but how often do they announce products before they are in beta either.

    It seems to me that they get to work on stuff until it's done and release it as a beta for some end user testing. I'm sure they have their own internal deadlines, but it looks like those deadlines aren't driven by marketing and product launch dates like they are in other companies.

    If something isn't done, or isn't done right, I don't think they release it. Compare that to most other companies.