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Why Google's New Products Need Not Succeed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the in-and-of-themselves-heretofore-thereunder dept.

RJS writes "There have been some industry analysts lately who have called into question Google's real success, claiming that while Google's search remains a big winner, it has missed the mark when it comes to generating profitable, secondary products. BusinessWeek has just such an article ("So much fanfare, so few hits") but others argue that success relative to the size of Google's bread-and-butter (search) ultimately doesn't matter because it doesn't cost Google much extra to keep these secondary services — like Gmail — operational: the Google grid is on and growing regardless of what services are being run on top of it."

1 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Yet they've caused innovation by JGuru42 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Google might not be making large sums of money off of their other products that have been created but it's hard to deny that they haven't caused a major change in how other online companies do their business.



    After using Hotmail for all those years and then switching over to GMail as my primary e-mail I was stunned by how many things Gmail did that made it easier to work with. Now my junk e-mail account was still at Hotmail and when they asked me to be part of the beta testing for Windows Live Mail I figured it's only the junk e-mail account so I gave it a shot.



    Windows Live Mail seems like someone tried to take Outlook and GMail and just mash the two of them together. However, Microsoft has still dropped the ball in making it easy to work with. For anyone who is part of the beta just try and delete multiple mails at the same time. Due to my long time of using computers I have no problem but most regular users are going to have trouble.



    Even before Microsoft went for the complete overhaul they upped their maximum storage capacity in order to compete with GMail. So while it may not be a giant winner for Google money-wise, they've been a great boon to the end users who have finally started to see things get shaken up



    Just like the article mentions I'll leave this innovative and beautiful Google web program with just a name, as if you've used it it's not likely you've forgotten it: Google Maps.