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Tepid Results from Google's New Product Process
bart_scriv writes "BusinessWeek digs into Google's new products, first interviewing Marissa Mayer on the process behind the recent flurry of product launches; the essential process: 'try a bunch of new ideas, refine them and see what survives'. How successful is the process? Despite lots of fanfare, a close look at the products reveals that Google still hasn't produced a huge winner: 'An analysis of some two dozen new ventures launched over the past four years shows that Google has yet to establish a single market leader outside its core search business, where it continues to chew up Microsoft and Yahoo.'"
Its like the scene in UHF where a blind man trying to solve the Rubriks cube with the help of a seeing guy.
....
"Is this it ?"
"No!"
"Is this it ?"
"No!"
1. Buy struggling company.
2. Rebrand their product.
3. Make free version and "professional" version.
4. Add web stuff, anything to tie it to Google servers, typically search or collaboration features.
5. Put it into "Beta".
6. ???
7. Profit!
How we know is more important than what we know.
I have a Yahoo account and at least one Hotmail account that were made before my migration to GMail. According to TFA, only 25% of me uses GMail, even though I almost never log in to the other accounts.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
So all you're really saying is you applied there too late?
gmail makes you jump through hoops to sign up. AOL makes you jump through hoops to cancel. They could form a partnership. AOL could offer a service to make it easy to sign up for a gmail account. gmail could offer a service to make it easy to cancel your AOL account.