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

[datdjrobp]

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

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.

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.
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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.

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.

--
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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.