Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

5 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. I for one... by opposume · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. gauction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Not many companies work that way by irikar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  4. Re:Google has to many beta products at the moment by kat11v · · Score: 3, Interesting
    IANAL so I can't be certain, but from what I've heard, the reason for the "keep everything in beta as long as possible" that we've been seeing from Google is largely due to legal rather than technical reasons. When the product is still in beta and hasn't been "officially" released, as it were, you can make changes to the User Argreement Contract without being liable to anyone else (such as perhaps the users that signed up under the old agreement).

    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*).

  5. Re:Google has to many beta products at the moment by generic-man · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.