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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.'"
It has gotten to the point where they release new products so often that I can't even keep track. I think they also spend way too much time on ideas that are aimed to hurt Microsoft (Such as the online spreadsheet idea) - these things are cool, but will anyone really pay for them? I think google executives know that the money train will stop someday soon, since they are selling their shares like crazy.
USB Drive disabler - works remotely
I would argue that gmail is pretty successful. It's forced Yahoo, Hotmail to offer much larger mailboxes to keep their clients.
Heck, even my local ISP, after 15 years of a 10MB mailbox (with a float to 15MB) suddenly offer 200MB on all 5 email addresses their service lets you use.
In addition, every user of Hotmail or Yahoo that I've brought over to gmail hasn't looked back. They all love it.
I call that a winner.
Michael Coyne
http://turthalion.blogspot.com
Google does not need that one killer app that will destroy the status quo. I find myself using Google products for quite a few things. They have a knack for taking something that everyone already uses and improving it enough to make the transition worthwhile. The author might deride GMail for not being a new invention, but at the time of its release (and I would argue even now) it offered the most features and free storage. Instead of e-mail papers back and forth, I have been using Writely for months. Again, nothing too groundbreaking, but it just plan works and saves me some aggravation.
My point is that Google provides resources that we all actually use, not some next big thing that will change the paradigm for good.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
I think the author of that article, and many of the /. posters are missing the point. Advertising is a numbers game. Google doesn't need 50%+1 market share on their calendar app in order for it to be a success. What they need is page loads. Every time a user reads an e-mail, Google makes money. Every time a user gets driving directions from Google maps, Google makes money. Google doesn't need a killer anything app. They need tons and tons of traffic. The best way of doing that is to make as many good solid apps as they can now while their wallets are still fat from their IPO. Of COURSE their stock is over priced right now. It's going to go down. How much? Who knows. This is not a 'throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks' market strategy. This is a 'do every thing we can to increase page loads' strategy. It's working, and it's going to keep working.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
I agree that this is good, but if they just keep producing killer apps in the same fashion - producing Google SQL to compete with MS Access, Google Present! to compete with PowerPoint, etc. - then they might see just the same tepid response that they're receiving now.
Hypothetical: What if Google produces an analog for every single application that you use today, only it's free and on the web? Prediction: You still wouldn't use them, or would only use them occasionally.
Well, what's the problem, then? The problem is that web apps - Google's as much as anyone else's - don't offer the unified experience of a locally-installed software base.
Google Earth is a silo: you visit that site, and you do your satellite-spy thing, and then you leave.
Google Picasa is a silo: you visit the site, and you edit your photos, and then you leave.
Gmail is a silo: you visit the site, and you check and write email, and then you leave.
The model here is that every time you want to do something, you have to load up a browser, visit the site, and begin fresh work on some data. Data exchange between applications is limited at best: you might be able to extract some data (hoping it's in the right format) and upload it to another silo - but if not, you're strictly limited to copying and pasting some raw text.
Contrast this with your experiences working on a local software base. Everything is immediately available within a few clicks away from the Start Button, or the Mighty Apple, or your *n?x right-click menu - even if you don't have an internet connection. You have file associations; you have drag-and-drop; you have object linking; you have interoperability of office applications. And you have filesystem organization - if a project involves some email, some Word files, and a few spreadsheets, you can keep them all in the same folder.
You get none of this with the current generation of web apps.
Now if Google's gaggle of research efforts are some of the elements of a future GoogleOS, that's very promising. But they consistently (publicly) deny that that's their goal. And regardless of where Google might go tomorrow, it doesn't much impact what it is today: a company with many fledgling projects... but too little cohesion. Meanwhile, Microsoft is going more in this direction, with WinFS and Avalon and such. Its efforts are kind of sucky because it's not really motivated by competition, but at least its aim is correct.
I hope Google succeeds - if nothing else, Bob knows that the desktop software market has been stagnant since, oh, 1995 or so. We need some competition and fresh blood. But that's not a trend that one can extrapolate from its current model.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
And my experience was the opposite. Though I can't really give any details, as I got the job and have now signed an pretty far-reaching NDA, the recruitment process for Google Engineering was extremely rapid despite consisting of over 7 hours of interviews!
The questions were very thorough, really that's the deepest and widest technical interview I've ever done, though I was slightly surprised at the lack of interest in asking traditional personal-type interview questions. Even so I was generally impressed at how slick the thing was. They hire constantly and it shows - the longest I had to wait for feedback before going onto the next stage was about a week. Very far from "collapsing under their own weight".
Maybe their executive/management and technical recruitment are wildly different in terms of quality, it's certainly possible. But anyway, consider your anecdote matched.
Bean was smarter than Ender (smart to an unholy / scary degree if you read the Bean quartet). However, in battle school, Beans record as a team leader was 0 - 10 compared to Enders perfect record.
Bean's failure rate was so high because he was trying to find out what strategies worked and which ones did not, and he did so by examining strategies that no one in thier right mind would try, just to see why they failed, and what things about them potentially worked. He did this because he did not care about the win / loss record, and he was using the school environment to find out what worked and what didn't.
And when he got out of the battle school, he never failed once.
Getting back to Google, they are trying products that may or may not work. Not everything needs to be a screaming huge success, and if gmail turned into a huge disaster, its not like it would invalidate their business model for Google Search.
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