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Why Google's New Products Need Not Succeed
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."
Google burst into the search scene with a no nonsense, pure search engine, and advertised it as a reaction against bloated portals. They concentrated on what mattered, search!, instead of bloat. Then they wanted to become really rich, and everything went wrong: Google become an ad-broker, and went public. The game here is that each year you have to have more profit and even a larger percentage of profit, or the stock will go down, and this is done by selling more ads, thus you need more page views, thus you need more services.
So now, because of the two guys' quest for monetary tokens, we have arrived at the opposite of Google's original self-aclaimed goal and purpose. Ok, but as anyone with a little sense knows, despite some blinded nerds and fanboys on Slashdot, all the extra services are kind of failures, as compared to search. Even something as cool as Google Maps, many have been fooled by the appeal the atlas had on them like a child.. a nice toy for a while but you're hardly searching the map everyday are you? Many of the services are kind of average. The problem arises because of two things: they lost their original focus and focus now on no particular thing; their interface model doesn't stand. The last one is like the story of the emperor without clothes. Google's interface is bad, for non-search services. Really, you can't expect to have a really basic search engine interface, and then transfer that to all those complex services. Gmail, I tell you, is a usability nightmare. If only they would have made it look like a real app/interface. All this interface knowledge about how to capture usablity complexity best is thrown away and had to make place for confusing "minimalistic" web page look, which isn't minimal anymore because of the complexity and runs out of steam as a concept.
Anyway, I'm sure many of you can have wonderful arguments against that, but in the end I and many others, especially the non-nerd population, find ourselves only or mainly using search, and the difference now is they don't focus anymore.
Now comes this press release. The prime and sole target seems to be stock holders. It's an admission of failure really, their "launch many services to get much more page views" strategy failed, and now they need to spin it. This message is targetted at spinning that failure for stock holders.
Also, to claim the cost and risc is minimal is arrogant and dangerous. Stock holders read that as: Google has an enormous amount of overhead, lowering the barrier of competing/market entrance, and making space for another company to do the same, better and cheaper. It's not like it hasn't been done before... (Admittedly Google's is trying its best to higher the barrier of entrance in all other ways.)
Baidu for instance doesn't buy token Internet pioneers or gives their employees bloated salaries to spend 20% on toy projects. Yahoo! Search is still inferior but their harvesting is already superior and their sandbox alltheweb.com looks promosing on the logic side. MS has proven many times you should never judge them on a version 1 or 2, just get more scared if the versions keep coming.
Google shouldn't do bullsh!t or damage control or hire expensive spin doctors or try to get Google to Mars. For me as a user, they should concentrate on search. As a stock holder I have conflicting wishes, they should do better on search and much better on other services, and their sole income, out of ads, scares the hell out of me with all the click fraud and spammers turning their attention on Google with link farms and zombie click farms. As a stockholder, their diversity strategy is failing, and the message they give me is: lalalala I can't hear you oh no it was supposed to be this way etc. etc. This will not do. Stock holders want to hear how they stop being boys and start earning them more money.