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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.'"
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.))
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
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?
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.
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.
"...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.
A strong #2 doesn't sound like miserable failure to me.
--
Carnage Blender : Meet interesting people. Kill them.
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".
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?
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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.
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!!!
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
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.
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.
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
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.
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No, they're a data mining company which has happened to find that searches are the best place to put carefully targeted ads.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
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
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
Gotta love this:
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.
Excuse my speling.
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