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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
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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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