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Google Winning By Losing?
eldavojohn writes "The CEO of a small search company wrote an interesting piece for Search Insider about Google's unique strategy. It notes that Google has yet to become a leader in any technology other than search — but that its mostly unsuccessful attempts to branch out all end up bolstering its brand, and thus its search ad revenue. Is the new recipe for success to do one thing unbelievably well and several other things indifferently? Does this remind you of strategies from any other companies?" From the article, "Some of Google's non-search projects are really extensions of its search monetization, and are likely to succeed. But others projects mean entering areas where Google doesn't have much experience, and is taking a risk. With regard to those riskier areas, the key question for Google's future is whether it can realize that losing is really one of the best assets the company has."
This goes right along with the saying that "Any news is good news". As long has the Google name keeps getting spread around and people keep talking about the new things they are doing, this will drive viewers it its different pages and products.
Search, Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps, Picasa
Google has several interesting and best of breed web based applications. Not all of their products are going to be the best at what they do. This should hardly be news to anybody.
I'm working off the same principle by intentionally failing my degree.
Most companies have some MBA types sitting at the top working out how "the street" is going to respond to their every action and pushing that advice down the tree to tell developers what to do. As such, analysts (like this guy) are always trying to figure out what these MBA types are thinking, and why they are doing certain actions. This isn't how Google works. The developers are basically set free to do whatever the hell they want and they get rewarded when the company does well from it. Is it any surprise to find that the analysts are confused by Google?
How we know is more important than what we know.
My experience of Google's non-search applications so far suggests that they are far from mediocre. It's inevitable that it will take them longer to really come to the fore in fields which are more mature that the search engine market was when they first rose to prominence.
In addition, they have an excellent ability to fill niches in the market that are not being filled adequately (e.g. Picasa, Maps, News), and their products are differentiated by being ad-supported but otherwise free, which is a devastating approach for any competitor relying on a micropayment or subscription model. They seem to have the leverage to do things no other company could do at the moment, such as the book search system they are building and the Scholar academic journal search engine. This means that even if the implementation is 'indifferent' the sheer usefulness of the actual data being delivered still sets them apart.
In other news, why do we really need more Google news? Wake me up when something new actually happens. Some guy writing some vague opinions about some company is not 'news' in any sense.
Read Pynchon.
Does this remind you of strategies from any other companies?
/.ing the links, etcetc)
I was kinda thinking you were talking about Microsoft, but they don't do anything well.
Apple cannot be it because they do everything well.
However, this does remind me of Slashdot
Does one thing well (dupes)
and is bad at everything else (stories, having links work, not
(this post would have been SOO much better if this story was indeed a dupe)
Google is trying to maintain the appearance of being innovative, and doing a good job of it. Every time they release a new product, even if they downgrade its importance or ditch it later, it gets tremendous buzz. Buzz is where it's at, and everytime they generate more buzz they drive more advertisers, searchers, and AdSense publishers to their site.
Another advantage to developing TONS of new products is that it keeps their folks busy on cool/fun new products. Most software engineers want to be able to go home to their families and have something fun to show them as an example of what they do. Showing your kid GoogleMaps or GoogleEarth will impress the heck out of them, and they'll think you're a genius.
If Google didn't have the 70/20/10 development principal, these engineers would be going home and answering their friends' prompts with "Ummm...if you want to know what I do, check out the results of searching for Mexican Pizza now vs. 2 years ago, the results are so much more relevant". Fun.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Google has a lot of money to throw around at the moment, perhaps too much to not be trying something new.
On the other hand, I really think it needs to actually make one of those "side projects" into a real win, because I think that as good as Google search is, I don't know that its worth that market cap by itself. I think people invested in Google precisely because they thought they could use their search advantage to create other products that would be successful. To that end, I think Google is doing what it should be doing, but they may want to find something that works really well and maybe not go too far overboard with accepting indifferent projects. Loss leaders are fine, but you can't have every product be one. Even Microsoft has a fair proportion of revenue generators in addition to the indifferent crap that they give away for free. Google has... search.
The YouTube acquisition bothers me in that regard. People would like to think that YouTube could get common carrier protection, or that they can somehow reach a deal with the MPAA/RIAA sharks, but I'm not sure I'd bet the farm on that The acquisition was expensive and dangerous to begin with. Now, the Google ownership makes it worth the effort of having the sharks attack for a score. Google isn't an ISP and there's no reason that just because you have an unfiltered website for posting means that you are now in the same boat as telcos and ISPs in terms of not being liable for what goes over your lines. YouTube isn't infrastructure, its a leaf node.
Google's got a lot of goodwill capital, but eventually, I think someone is going to start asking where the bacon is if the investment money is being used for indifferent projects around plain old search.
When Google does it it's an interesting and enigmatic experiment that everybody likes to watch, but when it's Microsoft (and we're talking about exactly the same thing here, except that they started 10 years ago) then they're "stumbling in the dark" and it's just "a matter of time before they fail". XBox, MSN, Encarta, most of their server products, etc. That's just too funny.
Sure, being number one goes back to primeval days. However, various research has shown that while the alpha male chimpanzees slug it out, the next guy down is getting more sex.....
Perhaps Google are just not stupid enough to be pouring their energy into alpha-male business tactics.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
1. Do one thing well
2. Suck at everything else tried
3. ?
4. PROFIT!
Table-ized A.I.
Actually, what you want has already been done, to a certain extent. Enter Monzy's "Unsafe Search".
It works by submitting your query to Google twice: once as a regular query, and once with Google's "SafeSearch" enabled. It then subtracts all of the "SafeSearch" results from the regular query, leaving you with only the hits that Google deems "unsafe." Brilliant!
This is what Oracle does. To me, they are a database vendor. Yes they have development tools in java, application servers, soa solutions etc. I have been working with their technology for over two years now, and the products other than the database really sucks. The database sucks too, but it sucks in a stable manner.
Especially the application server is a pain in the a.s, and their development tools make you question your life as a developer. At the moment they have a product portfolio hidden behind their brand constructed by the database. This seems to work though, they somehow reflect the image of a large vendor with many solutions. (not to me, but to managers, market etc.)
What will determine Google's business success in the long run is a) the moats it can build around its businesses, and b) whether they can overcome their competitors' moats. (A moat is some advantage that protects the company from competition. In the tech industry this is usually called "stickiness")
In some of the businesses mentioned in the article, such as IM and email, moats exist, but unfortunately Google is on the wrong side of those moats. AIM and Y! Mail are on the inside, and Google is on the outside trying to get in. These moats are not that strong (very few are in technology), but it doesn't look like Google is making too much headway. If anyone should be scaring Yahoo Mail and AIM, it's Facebook and Myspace. Those guys already have a list of your friends, which eliminates a major switching cost, and they have already shown that contextualized communication wins. (Most college kids don't use email anymore -- they use fb.) I'm convinced that only business-related email is saving email as a paradigm in the next 10 years, but who knows what can happen in that time?
I have been trying to identify Google's moats and I can think of a few. The first is the brand name. Google is cool because they release a bunch of cool technology and they win the evangelizers, who are really important when it's only a matter of picking among similar-quality search engines. The second is that they have supposedly assembled a really amazing team. This is not so easy to do, even with a large amount of money, as MSN Search has shown. Finally, the infrastructure has to be given some credit. Not just the hardware farms, but the gigantic databases that have been assembled over time which might make Google a better-informed and therefore better-results-producing search.
The above moats -- both google's and competitors' -- are only fair, not permanant. The upside is that Y! and AIM's moats can be destroyed. So it is conceivable that in the long run, Google chips away and evenutally wins those markets through tough-nosed competition. They'll have to make much better sites before we get to that point.
The downside is that these moats are not as strong as platform lock-ins. Technologies are so interdependent that platforms (something other companies are truly dependent on) naturally form monopolies, and those monopolies naturally give birth to other monopolies. Microsoft is a perfect example. And it is not hard to imagine them using their browser platform to become the winner in search. Unfortunately, google has not yet been able to form a platform (gmaps mashups don't count). I think they are really trying to do this by becoming what we used to call a portal (before 2.0 was cool). The problem is that nobody is dependent on any of their pieces. Web search isn't a dependency or a launching point, except to the extent that people used to use the search engine as their homepage (who needs that when we have search boxes in the browser?).
MS doesn't even need to make MSN as good as Google.. they just have to get it "good enough" such that it isn't worth people's time to switch away from the default search in IE. The whole idea espoused by the article of "winning by losing" is ridiculous. The fact is that Google is winning bigtime in search -- so big that they can afford to lose elsewhere. But they certainly aren't losing on purpose, or solely to promote the google brand. And they have little room for error in search.
Except it rarely works that way. I have some experience with both chess and Go, and have been the inexperienced player in that scenario more than once. I've yet to see even one single instance where it works like that from beginning to end.
The inexperienced player may pull one or two surprisingly good maneuvers out of sheer dumb luck, maybe even gain a temporary advantage out of those. But in the long run he'll fail to use and consolidate that advantage and the more experienced player will _bury_ him.
The chance to win a match by sheer dumb clueless doing something random that the other isn't expected is negligible because it just needs too many moves in a row where that happens. If the chance to make a surprisingly good and unexpected move is, say, 1 in 1000 (remember, it has to be not just good, but also some radical new strategy that noone tried before and the good player isn't expecting), then the chance to make two in a row is 1 in 1,000,000. And the chance to make 4 in a row is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000. Keeping up like that for a whole game is just not going to happen.
Plus, good players are good because they can adapt and use logic to different situations. He's not going to just give up and run in circles for the next half an hour just because you did one different move. He'll keep reacting and probing and you only need to get out of that lucky streak once or twice for him to fully use it against you.
Basically "beginner's luck" is a myth. It's a crap excuse by people who aren't as good as they think, to not admit that they played badly. Or that maybe they let you win. But if they didn't, then that supposed beginner actually played pretty damn well.
And if Google's secret sauce is "beginner's luck", then maybe all it says is that the big "experienced" players are the ones playing badly in that space. Maybe it's not Google who's clueless there.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
They're what bring you to Google's product.
Google's product is adsense and adwords.
Deleted
I just did a side by side. Yahoo Maps Beta was slower, jerkier, and takes a long time to reload images after I zoom extensively.
I'm a Google fan, but when a better product comes along, I'll use it. Yahoo Maps isn't there yet.
An important change for education.
Microsoft is proof that you don't have to be the best to win, you just have to be ubiquitous.