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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."
don't care how they deside. As long as they keep coming out with more usefull tools that will make my life easier, that's all I care about. Keep up the good work google!
I haven't lost my mind. It's backed up on disk somewhere.
When will Google bring out the google auction site??! Ebay has nothing on them except brand recognition. I know google can pull off a better interface and faster server performance. The competition will help keep the costs low.
Under promise and over deliver. How many companies work that way these days?
How many programmers in how many companies have to over work in order to try to achieve what was over-promised and consequently under-delivered by over rated marketing and executive dudes?
I'm not sure I totally subscribe to the idea of staying in beta for that long though... But you have to admit the idea of gmail invites is brilliant. Once gmail leaves the beta stage, its user base will be huge. Anyone has an idea of how big this user base is already?
Exactly. I would hope that they would find that the majority of their employees would find 70% of what they do interesting. Otherwise, what are they doing there? Just a paycheck? That would be sad.
But from looking through their website and doing a strict count of what products and services they have, I would say that 70% of them are experimental, and 10% or 20% count for the search engine part. But that's based on count.
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?"
Well it's free and in beta, right? What did you expect?
But hopefully they also give a discount to advertisers who place ads on Gmail, since Gmail's still in beta. Or at least warn them.
$8.95/mo web hosting
My experience has been very good with their betas, the product is completely usable and any problems are usaly very subtle bugs or usability issues.
I get annoyed at companies that use betas to unit test their applications.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Don't knock it so hard. I make my life by underpromising and overdelivering? How does this work out so well? I can underpromise at a level that most people can't deliver even if they overpromise.
It gives me a comfort cushion to the level that I wish to excel every day. Taking away the pizzazz of underpromising and overdelivering will force me to adopt a standard level of overachievement which then gives my critics a benchmark to hold me to.
I really hate performance reviews. It sucks being better than everyone else working in an organization where the de facto mantra is,"Never directly recognize or reward outstanding work."
In this case, I can see how it would make a lot of sense for Google to keep most of their new (or not so new) products in beta while all the wrinkes resulting from those are being smoothed out. After all, you never know when you'll be sued by some random European government over some unintended effect (*cough*France*cough*).
Bullshit. PayPal hasn't been "beta" for years, yet they are courteous enough to inform me when they change the terms of their User Agreement. If I don't agree to the terms of the new User Agreement, I have the option to terminate my account at any time.
Beta is all about deflecting criticism of Google products. GMail doesn't support IMAP? Well, it's in beta! Froogle can be easily exploited to report deceptively low prices -- that's in beta too! Google News often displays stories as 'related' when they have nothing in common, but that's in beta. It just goes on and on. People have very high expectations of Google, but Google hasn't released a new product since Google Groups (and that's been replaced by Google Groups 2, which is a sharply-criticized beta).
For more information, click here.
I'm really glad that such companies do exist. I'm sick and tired with all comapnies that over-promise and under-deliver.
As Microsoft is often accused of, i.e. our beta testing program is release it to the public and see what goes wrong then patch it.
While Microsoft is omnipresent and therefore their bugs get a lot of press, there are any number of vendors of products who get it wrong on the first try but still send it out.
We had a vendor at my last place of work who modified payroll code and installed it, untested, just before production runs. Unforgivable in my eyes, and it did blow up hideously at least once (which is why you don't do such things.)
I felt I bought a Beta Pontiac Fiero, years ago, because the first year were highly undesirable due to a staggering list of flaws. Mine was an utter lemon and I got really stuck on what was effectively a Beta car. THe company didn't stand behind it very well, either. "broken headbolt at 30,025 miles? normal wear and tear..."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Perusing the robots, I found: /kids/teeball/iraq /iraq and /text in every folder - whether it existed or not. Can't think of any reason, unless they don't want everyone to know about The bloodiest military mistake ever.
Disallow:
WTF
But really, it looks like they disallowed every
(Yes, this is a joke, look up google bombing [I think that's the term])
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Yeah, sometimes I feel like somebody who doesn't appreciate the awesome non-web-search stuff that Google is doing might feel like a fast-food manager I used to work for:
"If you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean."
I've recently seen in Waffle House they have a sign for the cook.. after the last order, "Kill the flame and GET IN THE GAME". Meaning to turn off the gas burner (they NEVER do) and to "walk the line," cleaning. Hey, remind me to never go back to a food service job, where the very idea that your work might be done and you might sit around for a minute or two is ludicrous. I can't believe I used to live like that.
My point is that some of these projects that come out, as cool as they are, seem extraneous, almost like they're SO BORED with web searching that they just come up with this stuff in their spare time.
"Oh, so I suppose that search code is BUG FREE, then??!?! Huh, Google?"
I love Google. Love 'em. The mapping is awesome, the mail is awesome -- I even love Google Sets, which seems to be perpetually in the lab.
RP