Tepid Results from Google's New Product Process 237
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.'"
Product release overload (Score:5, Interesting)
USB Drive disabler - works remotely [digg.com]
Gmail, anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Mail (Score:1, Interesting)
gmail requires the Google cookie and i'm not having any of that...
Success for Gmail rated on use of others??? (Score:2, Interesting)
So in an article about the success of Google products, the only way they gauge the success of Gmail is if someone also maintains an account with a competing service? What about Gmail users who use it exclusively (like me)?
Out of many, one (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [writely.com] 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.
Re:Success for Gmail rated on use of others??? (Score:3, Interesting)
But even assuming the stats were correct, it's silly to assume the measurement of success only includes Gmail users already using other competitors' products. There's plenty of people who use it and don't fall into that category.
Google is fine (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Gmail, anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
From a Wall Street point-of-view, this is troubling. You have a large business in a fast moving market hanging its entire hat on a single technology.
Re:at least it seems more fair (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that this is good, but if they just keep producing killer apps in the same fashion - producing Google SQL to compete with MS Access, Google Present! to compete with PowerPoint, etc. - then they might see just the same tepid response that they're receiving now.
Hypothetical: What if Google produces an analog for every single application that you use today, only it's free and on the web? Prediction: You still wouldn't use them, or would only use them occasionally.
Well, what's the problem, then? The problem is that web apps - Google's as much as anyone else's - don't offer the unified experience of a locally-installed software base.
Google Earth is a silo: you visit that site, and you do your satellite-spy thing, and then you leave.
Google Picasa is a silo: you visit the site, and you edit your photos, and then you leave.
Gmail is a silo: you visit the site, and you check and write email, and then you leave.
The model here is that every time you want to do something, you have to load up a browser, visit the site, and begin fresh work on some data. Data exchange between applications is limited at best: you might be able to extract some data (hoping it's in the right format) and upload it to another silo - but if not, you're strictly limited to copying and pasting some raw text.
Contrast this with your experiences working on a local software base. Everything is immediately available within a few clicks away from the Start Button, or the Mighty Apple, or your *n?x right-click menu - even if you don't have an internet connection. You have file associations; you have drag-and-drop; you have object linking; you have interoperability of office applications. And you have filesystem organization - if a project involves some email, some Word files, and a few spreadsheets, you can keep them all in the same folder.
You get none of this with the current generation of web apps.
Now if Google's gaggle of research efforts are some of the elements of a future GoogleOS, that's very promising. But they consistently (publicly) deny that that's their goal. And regardless of where Google might go tomorrow, it doesn't much impact what it is today: a company with many fledgling projects... but too little cohesion. Meanwhile, Microsoft is going more in this direction, with WinFS and Avalon and such. Its efforts are kind of sucky because it's not really motivated by competition, but at least its aim is correct.
I hope Google succeeds - if nothing else, Bob knows that the desktop software market has been stagnant since, oh, 1995 or so. We need some competition and fresh blood. But that's not a trend that one can extrapolate from its current model.
- David Stein
Re:at least it seems more fair (Score:5, Interesting)
And my experience was the opposite. Though I can't really give any details, as I got the job and have now signed an pretty far-reaching NDA, the recruitment process for Google Engineering was extremely rapid despite consisting of over 7 hours of interviews!
The questions were very thorough, really that's the deepest and widest technical interview I've ever done, though I was slightly surprised at the lack of interest in asking traditional personal-type interview questions. Even so I was generally impressed at how slick the thing was. They hire constantly and it shows - the longest I had to wait for feedback before going onto the next stage was about a week. Very far from "collapsing under their own weight".
Maybe their executive/management and technical recruitment are wildly different in terms of quality, it's certainly possible. But anyway, consider your anecdote matched.
Reminds me of Bean from Enders game... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:at least it seems more fair (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a fundamental flaw in market economies, not in shareholders. Shareholders have a limited lifespan and depend on their investments in the market for their retirement and in many cases income before retirement. If a stock A performs better than stock B now, the investor will go there, because real bankable gains outweigh theoretical gains a) because theoretical gains fall in the future, perhaps too late to make a difference for an investor's livable income and b) real gains are *real*, i.e. in a volatile marketplace like public investing where a company's fortune can shift overnight, much less over a decade or two, it's prudent to take the dollar you can count on now over a dime now and a theoretical two dollars in the future. Companies that try to "stay focused in the long run" without producing real net gains now (whether through dividends or increase) that are larger than those produced by their competitors will lose their investors to those competitors and thus lose their ability to focus in the long run and their ability to create new focuses after that.
This also carries over to funds at the meta level, i.e. funds must select stocks that perform now because if they don't they will be measurably outperformed by other funds now, and consumers will quickly go to the funds that perform best, often not over 100 years or even 50 years, but over 5 years or 10 years, which is really short-term in terms of gains from the business vs. R&D perspective.
It will just take time... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Here's the problem with that (Score:3, Interesting)
You're just making a petty semantic argument. When people say market, they just mean an area of competition. Just because the money comes in through ads (in common with other markets) is absolutely meaningless. Focusing on the mechanics of compensation over the facets of competition makes no sense. The bottom line is people need a search engine, and they either choose Google or Yahoo or MSN. That's a market.
killer app not the point (Score:2, Interesting)
It's cost effective in many ways, employees may tend to stay on target for their standard job and/or projects (that might otherwise be a bit dull) because they CAN flex their muscles and try new things. Google gets R&D on a budget from the people on their front lines, and then take what ever might come out of that, throw it up and see if it sticks. What a great and less expensive way to find the next killer app, while possibly defining the direction of the Internet & search, and keeping employees satisfied and 'on the team'.
Google Platform on Mozilla in the works (Score:3, Interesting)
Google has barely started. They're simply positioning their pieces right now. Their strategy is obviously a sneaky one: tiptoe up behind your opponents without drawing too much attention to yourself by openly beta-testing a variety of services, and then at the perfect moment, deliver the killing blow with the "kernel" of your plan that suddenly brings all these disparate services together into a nuke of integration. That kernel, for them, of course, is search.
What is search? It can be a lot of things, but in its finest form, it resembles what is popularly termed "AI". Can you imagine what Google could achieve by using search to suddenly unify all of its services? You get an email in Gmail about a picnic on the 23rd, and it's hyperlinked to a command that will put it in your Google Calendar. That's a simple scenario. Few seem to imagine search as an integration platform, like the GUI, but it is; it's not just for finding things.
I imagine the future of search to be a lot like how the ever-present computer voice in Star Trek could do almost anything for you. When computers are this sophisticated, what's the point of most GUIs? Just tell your computer what you want. GUIs can then be minimal and non-intrusive.
Now, the biggest complaint I hear about Google's services is that they have to be accessed online via a browser. Well, did you know that Firefox 3 is going to support the ability to run web applications offline [mozilla.org]?
-- random_blankspace attica ya-know-hoo dottius commius
Re:at least it seems more fair (Score:2, Interesting)
I've never been more excited about a computer program. 3D CAD with a state-of-the-art user interface? For FREE? Yeah, there are things it can't do, and the learning curve is non-trivial, but the capabilities it's going to give me (personally, this carbon unit) are astounding.
Suffice it to say, I'm pretty amped about this program.
I can't afford SolidWorks or CATIA, but I can afford this.
More of the same (Score:2, Interesting)
The good news is that the farm for ideas internally rather than have ideas come from the top down. But you don't have to be smart to have a good idea, and just getting a bunch of smart people in the same place doesn't guarantee good ideas. And what's more, good ideas do not guarantee profit. You can go on and on about how cool Google Earth is or how many of your friends use Gmail, but are these neat products profitable? It doesn't sound like it.
The bad news is that they have started off like so many other arrogant tech companies, and they may end that way.
1. Become an overnight success with one product (which, by the way, was not profitable until 2000 I think)
2. Hire people as fast as you can
3. Start a boatload of other little products
4. Profits wane because competitors catch up and attack your core business
5. Save money by killing the projects that don't or can't generate revenue
6. Lay people off
7. Now you have a bunch of dead product lines, users stop using them and find something else that's interesting, now you're irrelevant
Just because your business succeeds doesn't mean you have to do steps 2 and 3 above. If Google is losing focus on its core competency and overinvesting in non-profitable products they are on their way down already. Their product line is "cool", but that only buys mindshare which doesn't necessarily translate into money.
Releasing too early (Score:3, Interesting)
This hits the nail on the head. I checked out Google Finance pretty early and it wasn't as good as Yahoo so I stayed with Yahoo. (For instance, it had no stocks from the Toronto exchange.) I just checked it again today because of this article, and it has improved substantially. (The search box is especially impressive.)
I'm switching right now, but if this article hadn't appeared, I wouldn't.
Re:I tried gmail for a while... (Score:1, Interesting)