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Tepid Results from Google's New Product Process

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the still-a-fan-of-their-search-thingie dept.

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.'"

1 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. Product Updates? by why-lurk · · Score: 3, Informative

    My main complaint about Google's product releases is not their scattershot approach -- I'm happy to see them try to find ways to improve existing product niches.

    But they rarely seem to update their online products:
      * Gmail, despite its strong launch and obvious success, has seen little development since. By now, we would expect to see much stronger import/export features, more filtering and junk mail controls...
      * Google Video was pretty weak at launch, and amazingly, hasn't improved much since. Details on the videos shown is weak, and 3rd-party review links, imdb links, etc. are nonexistent. Methods for transferring and showing the video on portable devices and Tivo are... completely absent.
      * Froogle, News, Maps, and more have stagnated since their beta launch (except that Google's purchase of new imagery for Earth has benefited Maps), despite much improvement from the competition (seen Yahoo Maps lately?).

    In fact, pretty much the only products they regularly update are the native apps they purchased from startups, like Earth, Picasa, and Sketchup. These appear to have kept their development teams from pre-acquisition days, and continue to make small but regular improvements.

    It's amazing to me that a company with as many employees as Google can make so many online services appear to be the work of one or two developers in their spare time -- strong on concept, but weak on follow-through.

        --kirby