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."

Comments

I deduced the formula several months ago

[Neil Blender]

Here is the psuedo code:

if ( 1 ) {
create_new_product();
}

Formula

[LiquidCoooled]

I'm Feeling Lucky

Re:Formula

[standsolid]

Services synergy:

Imagine, You go to Google Maps and type in your address, then press "I'm feeling lucky".

It then uses Google Local to find the nearest (m/h)otel, then uses Froogle to figure out which one is the cheapest (considering distance and gas mileage). Hell it can even find reviews on usenet using Google Groups

Then it books the motel room for your lucky night.

Hm... this is Slashdot. Back it up a bit...

Pushing "I'm feeling lucky" will map out to the nearest, um, "independent escort service" using the same tools/methods as mentioned above. :)

The Creative Minds At Work

[ackthpt]

I have a friend who works at Google and he gave me a glimpse of the creative processes at work at the very top...

During the Christmas party, Sergey and Larry were driving a large radio controlled SUV around the offices.

Nothing unusual there.

So a few weeks later this same SUV comes bumping around the corner, with the top ripped off and a remote controllable camera mounted on the chassis. One of the two (Sergey & Larry) was navigating it, while the other was operating the camera.

I expect this is all part of their new Search Engine Strategy.

we love google, yes we do. without google we wouldn't know about this while searching for a louis vuitton leopardskin defrobnicator...

Re:The Creative Minds At Work

[nordee]

Yes, it's a meatspace crawler.

Re:The Creative Minds At Work

[DrewCapu]

It's a prototype for how they will verify that their maps are correct.

Ok, everybody! Pair up!

Beta as a part of branding, my foot

[winkydink]

"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?"

Re:Beta as a part of branding, my foot

[millwall]

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.

Re:Beta as a part of branding, my foot

[Anonymous Custard]

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.

Re:Beta as a part of branding, my foot

[avandesande]

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.

Re:Beta as a part of branding, my foot

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Re:Beta as a part of branding, my foot

[ackthpt]

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.

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..."

You missed an important part of the code

[Craig Ringer]

if (true)
{
Product* product = new Product;
product->setType(Product::Beta);
products.append(product);
}

Re:You missed an important part of the code

[ggvaidya]

if?! Maybe you meant while?

And yeah, I'm talking to you too, Gramps.

70-20-10

[de1orean]

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."

Re:70-20-10

[suso]

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.

I for one...

[opposume]

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!

Re:photo organizer??

[William_Lee]

It's Picassa.

http://www.google.com/downloads/

gauction

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:gauction

[Tsiangkun]

That's a lot of pressure to put on google. Going head to head with a powerhouse like ebay might be enough to cause the very intelligent people at google to crack and start functioning at a lower level of intelligence.

I wish they'd move into house search

[syntap]

I'd love to key in "DVD player remote" or "car keys" and have it show me a map of where it is in my house.

Re:photo organizer??

[ggvaidya]

It's called Picasa. It's a Windows-based program, though. Version 1 was very pretty but a bit slow on my comp. Haven't checked out v2 yet.

Re:Why oh why won't it fly?

[ovit]

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...

Google has to many beta products at the moment

[hsmith]

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?

Re:Google has to many beta products at the moment

[kat11v]

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*).

Re:Google has to many beta products at the moment

[generic-man]

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).

Re:Google has to many beta products at the moment

[Fnkmaster]

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.

All hail our computer overlords

[Anonymous Coward]

[conspiracy]What they don't tell you is that 100% of their buisiness model is to make Google so knowledgeable about everything that when it does spontaneously become artificially intelligent it can take over the world in a couple hours. What better way to approach the top-down method to AI design than with a gigantic search engine? [/conspiracy]

Not many companies work that way

[irikar]

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?

Re:Not many companies work that way

[jthayden]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

20% of google employee's time...

[jxyama]

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.

Re:Why oh why won't it fly?

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

An overrated .dot-com is once again ruling the roost. So let's see, given that it took, on average about, say, four and a half years for the other dot coms to collapse after their IPO, that puts google on course for bankruptcy in about 2007?

There are so many differences between Google and 99% of the dot coms that IPO'd, I'm not even sure where to start.

1. Google was already profitable before the IPO - they've been profitable since 2001, in fact.
2. Google did not give away control of their company to investors - public investors only hold 10% of the company, and the founders still fully control it.
3. Even if their share price collapses (it's most likely overvalued, but I'm not sure by how much), there's no reason the company has to collapse. A surprising number of "failed" dot-coms are still around and doing okay, even with tiny share prices. Google is in a much better situation than almost all of them were, in terms of long-term profitability and a sustainable business plan.

Re:robots.txt files revealing

[NemosomeN]

Perusing the robots, I found:
Disallow: /kids/teeball/iraq
WTF
But really, it looks like they disallowed every /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.
(Yes, this is a joke, look up google bombing [I think that's the term])

Microsoft is a competitor

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Here's their code:

5 REM Copyright 2005 Microsoft
6 REM Contact: marketing@microsoft.com
10 Load "Google.com"
20 Let newfeature = googlefeature
30 goto 30

So you've got NOTHING to do?

[ReadParse]

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