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Google Formula For Adding New Products
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."
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.
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.
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.