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

[ePhil_One]

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.

Google is collapsing under their own weight. I went through their hiring process looking to take on a management role, it was slow and focused on the wrong things. By th etime they would have come to a conclusion my search would have been over. And most of the things that would have been a big draw there 4 years ago are gone, they have IPO'd and their stock is massively overpriced, whatever options I might get awarded will likely be high and dry by the time I can exercise them, and their internal management does not seem to have handled the growth well, which is hardly surprising given the tech focus of their backgrounds.

Yeah, I've seen the raves about their hiring process, spent a few hours on the in B-school. It reminded me of all the other ground breaking cases we used that when we asked follow up questions, "Great, what happened 3 years later" you discover it all collapsed 6 months later. [Which is actually the beauty of an EMBA program, you are amongst all the other business leaders with the experience to see through the fluff and ask the important questions, they don't worry about the teacher not giving them an A because they already have an impressive resume and are actually looking to learn something]

Re:at least it seems more fair

[datdjrobp]

So all you're really saying is you applied there too late?

Re:at least it seems more fair

[tambo]

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 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

Re:at least it seems more fair

[IamTheRealMike]

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.

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

[aussersterne]

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.

This is a fundamental flaw in market economies, not in shareholders. Shareholders have a limited lifespan and depend on their investments in the market for their retirement and in many cases income before retirement. If a stock A performs better than stock B now, the investor will go there, because real bankable gains outweigh theoretical gains a) because theoretical gains fall in the future, perhaps too late to make a difference for an investor's livable income and b) real gains are *real*, i.e. in a volatile marketplace like public investing where a company's fortune can shift overnight, much less over a decade or two, it's prudent to take the dollar you can count on now over a dime now and a theoretical two dollars in the future. Companies that try to "stay focused in the long run" without producing real net gains now (whether through dividends or increase) that are larger than those produced by their competitors will lose their investors to those competitors and thus lose their ability to focus in the long run and their ability to create new focuses after that.

This also carries over to funds at the meta level, i.e. funds must select stocks that perform now because if they don't they will be measurably outperformed by other funds now, and consumers will quickly go to the funds that perform best, often not over 100 years or even 50 years, but over 5 years or 10 years, which is really short-term in terms of gains from the business vs. R&D perspective.

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.

Re:at least it seems more fair

[Moofie]

Clearly, you haven't yet grokked this Google Sketchup thing.

I've never been more excited about a computer program. 3D CAD with a state-of-the-art user interface? For FREE? Yeah, there are things it can't do, and the learning curve is non-trivial, but the capabilities it's going to give me (personally, this carbon unit) are astounding.

Suffice it to say, I'm pretty amped about this program.

I can't afford SolidWorks or CATIA, but I can afford this.

Re:at least it seems more fair

[ePhil_One]

One of the main rules of interview teams within startups I've been a part of... if their big draw to work with us is the option riches, reject.

So you're looking for people too stupid to consider their total compensation? Or maybe you think you're so special that people should be paying you for the privledge of working with you

Startups are inherently unstable and prone to failure. Quite often they can't afford to pay what stable companies can pay, and might be missing things like 401k's, wil require longer hours, can't afford to pay for training, etc. There's always the chance you come in tomorrow and find the doors loked and this months paycheck made of rubber. Folks take that chance becasue of the risk/reward, or because they can't get work elsewhere. Hiring in a startup, I look for the former, the folks who know they'll have a chance to drive the companies success and make those options riches. When I interview for a startup, I want to know what the odds are of getting to that point, because it also means I'm less likely to be surprised with that locked door. So I'll ask questions about company profitability, product plans, IPO's, management experience, company goals, etc. There's other rewards for working at a startup sometimes, sometimes you get to innovate new stuff, there could be rapid promotion opportunities, but I also have to put food on the table and a roof over my head

Of course, Google isn't a startup anymore. If I had signed up 4 years ago, I would have expected a modest return on my options, since I wasn't employee #10 in a high risk environment. If I signed up for Verizon I'd also expect a modest return on my options. But if I sign up today for Google, I expect the market will have come to its senses by the time I can exercise them, rendering them "worthless". So its a factor I would weigh when deciding what comapny to sign with. Options. Insurance. 401k. Training programs. Vacation Policies.

Re:at least it seems more fair

[poot_rootbeer]

I went through their hiring process looking to take on a management role, it was slow and focused on the wrong things. ...in your opinion. Google's HR department may have a different view of the process.

I think all that can really be concluded from your experience is that you and Google were not a good match for each other.

Re:at least it seems more fair

[Lord Ender]

If what you are saying is true, then the most successful companies would be privately owned. This is not the case.

Mail

[ajs]

Everyone I know or meet in a business context these days has two addresses: work and gmail. Sometimes they have another (like my home servers), but everyone has those two.

I haven't heard anyone use a Yahoo, MSN or Hotmail address in months.

Not a leader?! Please.

Product release overload

[IntelliAdmin]

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

Gmail, anyone?

[turthalion]

Google still hasn't produced a huge winner...

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.

Re:Gmail, anyone?

[Troy]

If I understand the article correctly, it is thinking solely in terms of revenue generated rather than popularity. For instance, Google Maps/Earth is wildly popular and there really aren't too many applications like it, but can you say that those products have made Google a substantial amount of cash? In comparison to their ad business, I don't think so.

From a Wall Street point-of-view, this is troubling. You have a large business in a fast moving market hanging its entire hat on a single technology.

Re:Gmail, anyone?

[rm69990]

You'd never know, Google inserts ads into both Google Earth and Google Maps. You will see sponsored links while using the products. Google doesn't disclose how much of their ad dollars from their own web properties come from which products (ie. Groups, Web Search, Gmail, Maps, Earth, etc.)

Process ?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!" ....

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.

Google

[foo52]

Whether or not Google is becoming more or less evil aside, they are growing too big too fast. Any company that tries to expand its market too quickly is in danger of callapsing under its own weight. Innovation is rare in todays society and I applaud it, but Google as a company should look inward and perfect its current product line before expanding into others. I for one would prefer a few great products than too many bad ones to name.

Out of many, one

[andrewman327]

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

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.

Google Business Strategy

[QuantumG]

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!

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?

Managed Innovation? (3M model?)

[webword]

3M has been doing something similar forever. (More here too...)

Is Google doing this as managed innovation or is Google throwing "it" against the wall to see what sticks?

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!!!

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

[andrewman327]

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.

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

[Winterblink]

The whole "by invite only" thing was a joke really, when you consider how easy it was to get an invite. People were giving them out on various message boards, and even here via /. comments at one point. Eventually those new accounts got invites, and suddenly everyone had a Gmail account.

But even assuming the stats were correct, it's silly to assume the measurement of success only includes Gmail users already using other competitors' products. There's plenty of people who use it and don't fall into that category.

Google Search Success?

[webword]

I think that people are too focused on Google being a search company. You have to follow the money. Google is an advertising company, not a search company.

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.

Google is fine

[bberens]

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.

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

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

is the system of choice for only about one-quarter the number of people who use MSN and Yahoo e-mail.

So in an article about the success of Google products, the only way they gauge the success of Gmail is if someone also maintains an account with a competing service? What about Gmail users who use it exclusively (like me)?

I can see how you could read it that way, but I don't think thats the way it is meant. They are trying to say Google only has about 1/4 the total users of MSN or Yahoo. If you have an account with more than one, you'd be counted for each system you have an account with. Now I have no idea if those numbers are for active users or all accounts, but by one measure or the other apparently Google only has 1/4 the users.

Product Updates?

[why-lurk]

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

Reminds me of Bean from Enders game...

[LordZardoz]

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.

END COMMUNICATION

It will just take time...

[brooke_nobody]

As I understand it, Google is employing the free-beta now, paid-service later strategy for their new products. They're entering into markets with established competitors and what better way to gain market share than to offer their products free of charge? If you want people to migrate their desktop environment onto the web via email & appointment schedules (MS Outlook -> Google Calendar/Gmail) and office tools (MS Excel/Word -> Google Spreadsheets/Notes) in innovative ways, you sure aren't going to get many people trying it out if they have to pay for it. And what about Adsense? Google is generating so much income from their advertising models they can afford to start up dozens of new ventures and takes bigger risks. It took time to get from command prompts to GUIs. It took time to get people to buy products online via credit card. It took time to develop the web into the social networking monster it's becoming. And it will take time for Google to eventually become the overlord of all web desktop environments. I may not like some of their practices, but I can't knock them for trying hard to bring us new technologies.

Re:Here's the problem with that

[birge]

What are you saying? You might as well say "there's NO market for broadcast television." Of course there is a market for search. It's just that search is paid for by ads.

You're just making a petty semantic argument. When people say market, they just mean an area of competition. Just because the money comes in through ads (in common with other markets) is absolutely meaningless. Focusing on the mechanics of compensation over the facets of competition makes no sense. The bottom line is people need a search engine, and they either choose Google or Yahoo or MSN. That's a market.

killer app not the point

[dweebzilla]

What Google is doing IMO is brilliant, by allowing employees to have pet projects and explore and push the boundaries using their expertise, Google is tapping directly into the "garage developer/inventor" projects of employees that might otherwise be developed outside of Google.

It's cost effective in many ways, employees may tend to stay on target for their standard job and/or projects (that might otherwise be a bit dull) because they CAN flex their muscles and try new things. Google gets R&D on a budget from the people on their front lines, and then take what ever might come out of that, throw it up and see if it sticks. What a great and less expensive way to find the next killer app, while possibly defining the direction of the Internet & search, and keeping employees satisfied and 'on the team'.

AOL and gmail: a match made in heaven?

[ClosedSource]

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.

Silo?

[cascadingstylesheet]

>Gmail is a silo: you visit the site, and you check and write email, and then you
>leave.

Huh? Like when there's an address in the email, and Google offers to map it for me? Like when there's a time in the email, and Google offers to put it on my calendar?

I have a GMail tab open at all times.

Re:Silo?

[cascadingstylesheet]

>I've been using Gmail for about two years, and I've never seen this feature. In
>fact, I'm looking at an email right now that clearly contains an address, and I see
>no link of any kind.

And I'm looking an email right now that has two addresses in it, and GMail is offering to map them both (under "Would you like to ..."). The HTML for one of the links is copied below.

<td class="cx"><img src="images/cob_map.gif"></td><td><div><a target="_blank" class="re" href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=4206+South+108 th+Street+Omaha,+NE+68137" onclick="return top.js._AD_GoTo(window,event,this,0,'oa')">Map this</a></div>4206 South 108th Street<br>Omaha, NE 68137</td></tr>

To the right of the email, above the sponsored links, and below the New Window and Print links.

Google Platform on Mozilla in the works

[alucinor]

Google has barely started. They're simply positioning their pieces right now. Their strategy is obviously a sneaky one: tiptoe up behind your opponents without drawing too much attention to yourself by openly beta-testing a variety of services, and then at the perfect moment, deliver the killing blow with the "kernel" of your plan that suddenly brings all these disparate services together into a nuke of integration. That kernel, for them, of course, is search.

What is search? It can be a lot of things, but in its finest form, it resembles what is popularly termed "AI". Can you imagine what Google could achieve by using search to suddenly unify all of its services? You get an email in Gmail about a picnic on the 23rd, and it's hyperlinked to a command that will put it in your Google Calendar. That's a simple scenario. Few seem to imagine search as an integration platform, like the GUI, but it is; it's not just for finding things.

I imagine the future of search to be a lot like how the ever-present computer voice in Star Trek could do almost anything for you. When computers are this sophisticated, what's the point of most GUIs? Just tell your computer what you want. GUIs can then be minimal and non-intrusive.

Now, the biggest complaint I hear about Google's services is that they have to be accessed online via a browser. Well, did you know that Firefox 3 is going to support the ability to run web applications offline?

-- random_blankspace attica ya-know-hoo dottius commius

More of the same

[Foobartacus]

Google is doing the same thing that most companies (or individuals) do when they get a lot of money for doing one thing well: they try a million other things. Like the moviestar who decides to make an album or write a children's book, the Google brain has decided that since it solved the search problem it can solve most other problems--and better than their competition.

The good news is that the farm for ideas internally rather than have ideas come from the top down. But you don't have to be smart to have a good idea, and just getting a bunch of smart people in the same place doesn't guarantee good ideas. And what's more, good ideas do not guarantee profit. You can go on and on about how cool Google Earth is or how many of your friends use Gmail, but are these neat products profitable? It doesn't sound like it.

The bad news is that they have started off like so many other arrogant tech companies, and they may end that way.

1. Become an overnight success with one product (which, by the way, was not profitable until 2000 I think)
2. Hire people as fast as you can
3. Start a boatload of other little products
4. Profits wane because competitors catch up and attack your core business
5. Save money by killing the projects that don't or can't generate revenue
6. Lay people off
7. Now you have a bunch of dead product lines, users stop using them and find something else that's interesting, now you're irrelevant

Just because your business succeeds doesn't mean you have to do steps 2 and 3 above. If Google is losing focus on its core competency and overinvesting in non-profitable products they are on their way down already. Their product line is "cool", but that only buys mindshare which doesn't necessarily translate into money.

I tried gmail for a while...

[YesIAmAScript]

I use yahoo. Did before. Do now.

I started using gmail in the early days, and the UI was too sparse. They wanted to force me to search. I didn't want to search. Additionally, they made the compose button look different from the rest, making it difficult for me to find (call me retarded, I don't care).

I went back to yahoo. I use my gmail account for almost nothing. I go there about once a month.

I just wish I could get onto the Yahoo beta. Will they ever finish that?

Releasing too early

[p3d0]

Google's philosophy of launching "early and often" frequently leads to products that start out on a par, at best, with those of competitors, giving Internet users little reason to change their surfing habits.

This hits the nail on the head. I checked out Google Finance pretty early and it wasn't as good as Yahoo so I stayed with Yahoo. (For instance, it had no stocks from the Toronto exchange.) I just checked it again today because of this article, and it has improved substantially. (The search box is especially impressive.)

I'm switching right now, but if this article hadn't appeared, I wouldn't.

google creates app space, MS ends them

[cylcyl]

It just seems that when google enters an app space, it raises interest and awareness and utilization of the app space (tho not necessarily google's version of the app).

Before gmail, webmail existed, but was klunky, slow and not too useful. gmail starts and everyone is paying attention to their webmail service in terms of performance, disk space, and UI.
Before gmail, ajax existed, but no one cared. after gmail, it's the hottest thing since baked bread.
Before gmaps, mapping was starting to fall off charts of desktop app and only for gps. with gmaps and the various mash-ups, the application is limitless
Before gEarth, satellite imagery was a classified thing given only to the rich and priviliged. with gEarth, satellite integration into mapping became almost required and more people have access to it
Before gSpreadsheet. MS was pretty much the only game in town. OOo was there, but just offers nothing that MS doesn't. There was just no incentive to use it. but since gSpreadsheet allowed for on-line spreadsheet edit on reliable/fast servers. I've started using it to keep lists (DVD collection, anime, game high scores, etc)

Similar things can be said of just about any app space they entered. As opposed to MS, when they enter an app space, they crush the competition, and let it fester and interest in the app dies because (such as what happened to spreadsheet, document editors, browsers) there is no more innovation because MS is not willing to invest and no one else dares invest because there is no way to compete against MS, and the users lose out because functions they may want is never created. Google changes that and breathes life or new life into the app space