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.'"

Comments

at least it seems more fair

[yagu]

Google is an amazing search-engine success, spearheading some of the greatest technology, especially internet, innovation and competition in the last twenty years. That's as it should be. And Google has pulled off so far what noone else has, a head start, salvo across Microsoft's bow from which Microsoft still has not recovered.

Each additional degree of Microsoft's ship's list translates into that much more level of a playing field. Google more than any other single company has been the greatest contributor to that.

And, as it should be on a more level field, Google isn't going to get a free pass on their other work. That's great! Google has had some false starts with their other products. That's great! Google may even fail completely with some of their work. That's great!

At least Google (and now others) are all on point together, sweating out the competition, working on that next great internet killer app, and they're all having to compete publicly for a change.

I'll take three-year Betas any day over "announced" but yet un-priced future products from other large software companies. I'll try less-than-great first efforts any day over products tied to my architecture, leaving me no choices.

Google's going to fail with some of their efforts, but they've changed the landscape of the internet, and internet applications, software competition, and user choices. Hopefully, forever.

(A worrisome problem: the stockholders' pressure on these companies keeps pushing on these companies to produce and show profit now. I applaud Microsoft, in one example, in their snubbing of shareholders by announcing huge investments in R&D, rather than upping their dividends. In the long run, companies that stay focused will be the winners, for themselves, for the consumers, and for the shareholders (though, I still hold Microsoft in high suspicion for their motivation for pouring huge resources into R&D, aka... working on cutting off someone else's air supply.))

Re:at least it seems more fair

[aprilsound]

I completely agree. You always see the trolls say that Google should "focus on search", as though by throwing more people at search is going help things. Look how well that worked for Windows. MS got bigger, releases got slower. The fact is, you can onlty have so many people doing search.

Any good businesman will tell you that failure is 95% of business. Most new buisinesses fail, most new products are not a roaring success. All Google needs is for one or two of its two dozen ventures to establish even a niche market (*cough* gmail *cough*) and it will make money hand over fist. Remember, Google is still the underdog in all of these new ventures, so almost any gains are a positive thing.

Re:at least it seems more fair

[cygnusx]

> You get none of this with the current generation of web apps.

You're right about the current generation, but the writing is on the wall...

Imagine a browser that ships with database (these days modern processors can run MySQL or SQL Server Desktop Edition pretty easily) and has top-notch WebDAV support.

Now imagine that unlike Firefox's relatively sucky file manager capabilities (well, it does give you a list of files if you type file:///), this browser's file manager look more like Nautilus and can do local files + WebDAV seamlessly.

Now imagine you have a rich control toolkit, like the WHAT-WG is cooking up, and that applications using these rich controls can be cached locally and take advantage of the local relational data store (the built-in database) to store data when the user is offline.

Just for kicks, add in a scheduler that can reliably move large files across localstoragewebstore.

By now, you have enough 'richness' in this 'browser' that it can with some justification call itself a GUI shell. Throw in an IM and email client and a large percentage of PC (including Mac) users wouldn't need much else.

As for 'silos', well-- implementing a clipboard on the web is simple using XML, as Ray Ozzie demonstrated recently. And if a rich browser environment ever caught on, I'd expect websites will soon start plugging into each other's UI seamlessly using a 'parts' approach.

Prediction: Google will do this (probably by working with the Mozilla Foundation). Because (a) it makes sense for them to do it (their advertising model works wonderfully here) and (b) if they don't, Microsoft will. Why would Microsoft do this? Because it'll improve the PC experience and make apps more web-like (install-on-demand, auto-upgradeable, etc) and because there's a real chance they can get annuity from customers (which improves stock price) instead of one-time sales. Of course, Microsoft does online ad sales now, so they'll probably offer a free ad-supported version as well.

So what?

[Telastyn]

Do gmail, the calendar, local searching, satelite mapping, their ads and innumerable other good stuff need to be a market leader to be considered a success? With the hit or miss nature of pretty much every other single company in the world, isn't the fact that pretty much everything google puts out doesn't suck a sign that the process works well?

Re:So what?

[Herkum01]

In the seventies, there was a huge study in how to create a successful business. One of those areas they found as being important was "Market Leader". The reason, it was easier for the "Market Leader" to achieve "Economies of Scale"( ie. It is cheaper to produce 10,000 units instead of 5,000 units).

Being a market leader was not the only variable in this study, just one of several. However, it appears "a little knowledge is dangerous" applies here. I doubt "Economies of Scale" (and thereforce "Market Leader") is as important to IT compared with manufacturing cars. They took one potential variable and applied it to Google without looking at the big picture of how it all works.

Quantity Over Quality

[lbmouse]

"...Google has yet to establish a single market leader outside its core search business, where it continues to chew up Microsoft and Yahoo."

Is it me or has anyone else noticed the decline in quality search results from Google? Maybe this flurry of product launches continues to chew up its core search business. I'm not a big fan of the "throw-shit-on-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks" business model. Focusing on quality over quantity seems less evil.

Setting the bar too high?

[jbellis]

  Case in point: Google Maps, which trails only MapQuest in mapping-site traffic thanks to such innovations as aerial views and "click-and-drag" maps to make navigation easier. The product has become so popular that other outfits build new businesses or services around it, creating "mash-ups" that show things like real-estate listings or crime statistics on top of Google's maps. And four-year-old Google News offers top stories in 40 different countries and languages. That has spurred a jump of over 600% in international usage in the past year, making it the second-most-trafficked news aggregation site.

A strong #2 doesn't sound like miserable failure to me.

--
Carnage Blender : Meet interesting people. Kill them.

re: email addresses

[King_TJ]

The thing with Yahoo email is, they partnered up with other big players, so they host more email than you might at first realize.

EG. I've been a Southwestern Bell DSL Internet customer for years. At one point, SBC partnered up with Yahoo, and migrated email over to Yahoo's servers. I still got to keep my "@swbell.net" address, however. It just runs through Yahoo POP and SMTP servers instead of SBC's own mail server.

Many other users of SBC/AT&T DSL services are doing similar things with addresses ending in "@sbcglobal.net".

Losing Focus of Google's Core Business

[kungfuSiR]

I think the author of this article is far too focused on the idea that Google should be trying to expand its core business, when I believe that Google is focused on finding new places for its core business to operate. Most of the "new" services Google is offering are nothing more then ways to extend the reach of their core business. Take for example Gmail, an amazing free mail service that has allowed Google another outlet for its advertisers to place ads. Through the beta we have seen more advertising, and better ad targeting due to information being collected about you through Gmail. Another example of this strategy is Google Video which is now placing targeted advertising in videos in order to provide their advertisers with yet another venue to attract consumers. To me it just seems that Google has been looking for ways to increase how much money it can make from its core business, which of course is advertising. These "new" services that Google releases, in my opinion, are just extensions of this core business model. So in the end isn't Google doing a great job?

Sometimes I wish I could buy something from Google

[billtom]

Of course, it's nice to get all the free stuff, but there are times that I wish that I could pay Google directly for some of their products. Why? Because I want to clearly signal to them that I want them to keep the product around and keep working on it. When the means for the consumer to signal the producer is absent (for example, in Picasa) or indirect (for example, in gmail), there's a larger risk that the producer will discontinue the product (or stop active development of it).

For example, I use gmail all the time. But I have never, not once ever, clicked on an ad in gmail. So from my input, a bean-counter at gmail could conclude that I don't care about gmail.

Sure, I could click on ads from time to time even though I have no interest in the products in the ads, but there are times that I wish I could just give Google a few bucks a year to give them a direct incentive to keep gmail going.

Re:Success for Gmail rated on use of others???

[MrSquirrel]

I call FUD! The "statistics" they use are baloney. Google has one-quarter the number of people that MSN and Yahoo do? ...maybe one quarter the addresses, but I disagree on the "people" part -- why, I myself have 4 Yahoo email accounts (and just one gmail account) so if everyone was like me than an equal amount of people use gmail and Yahoo. I realize not everyone is like me (oh, trust me, I definitely realize this), but I still have a hard time accepting their "statistics" that gmail has 1/4 the users of hotmail and yahoo mail. Hotmail and Yahoomail have been around for over 12 years (I think I got my first yahoomail account in 95), gmail has been around for 2 (a lot of that time it was locked up and you could only get in through invites). How many of those hotmail and yahoomail accounts are unused? If these questions were answered and backed up with numbers then maybe I would believe the article... until then, I repeat my original statement: FUD!!!

Good enough is good enough

[ztirffritz]

Google does not need to be market leader in any particular fields. They just need to be good enough. Their business is presenting advertising that is targeted to an audience. Whatever they can do that keeps your eyes focused on their ads is a success. MS Maps may be a better product than Google Maps, but if I can click on a on a google search result and from that one click I'm able to find the vendor, call them, schedule an appointment and put it on my calendar, tranfer funds to them, and record the transaction on a spreadsheet I'd say Google just kicked the snot out of any of their competitors...they just managed to get me to look at about 10 times more ads than their competitors, and the ads are better targeted as well because they now know that I'm willing to spend money on product x and live near location z. This information only further refines their marketing tools.

Re:Google Search Success?

[jacksonj04]

No, they're a data mining company which has happened to find that searches are the best place to put carefully targeted ads.

Re:Google Search Success?

[IAmTheDave]

They're a tech company that currently brings in the majority of revenue on advertising.

Gotta love this:

Google still hasn't produced a huge winner

No... except for the search engine, AdWords (thank you for that Google...) and Google maps, which is mashed up just about everywhere and basically launched the AJAX craze.

Besides, what's a huge winner?? Gmail has millions of users... but I guess due to their market cap, Gmail will only be a big winner if it has BILLIONS of users??

Besides - yeah, they're giving MS a run in certain areas, but let's not also forget that they're also forcing Yahoo! into this century as well.