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I am not an Apple fan-person by any means, but Steve Jobs had a Product philosophy that stuck with me many years after he described it: You can't start with a

I am not an Apple fan-person by any means, but Steve Jobs had a Product philosophy that stuck with me many years after he described it: You can't start with a cool technology and build a product / user experience around it; you have to start with a vision of a coherent user experience, and build the technology around _that_. I think that's my biggest frustration with Google: they have interesting and really cool tech that is just way too fragmented. The structure of controlled chaos via launching many products as experiments and culling down to the "best" ones makes it difficult to provide consistent, cohesive experiences.

eikenberry 8y ago
I think Google is bad at taking this advice because their original big success was a cool technology that they built a product / user experience around (their search tech).
- trhway 8y ago
  > their original big success was a cool technology that they built a product / user experience around (their search tech). i think it is other way around - they significantly improved existing pain point of bad web search user experience by applying and implementing what in its core is citation analysis that had long been used in academia. The other successes also seem to start with a task or need at hand not with a cool tech - while Android may have started as a vision, its purchase was a result of the need for mobile OS, Youtube guy wanted a place to publish videos, Chrome originating from Webkit is definitely not a cool tech, more like Google didn't have enough strength/balls to go with Mozilla while having pressing need for a browser to control, Maps and GMail were significant improvement upon existing user experience, while in contrast Google Wave for example was cool tech for completely new, from scratch user experience.
dehrmann 8y ago
> You can't start with a cool technology and build a product / user experience around it; you have to start with a vision of a coherent user experience, and build the technology around _that_. That's another way of saying don't build-out solutions looking for problems.

eikenberry 8y ago

I think Google is bad at taking this advice because their original big success was a cool technology that they built a product / user experience around (their search tech).

trhway 8y ago
> their original big success was a cool technology that they built a product / user experience around (their search tech). i think it is other way around - they significantly improved existing pain point of bad web search user experience by applying and implementing what in its core is citation analysis that had long been used in academia. The other successes also seem to start with a task or need at hand not with a cool tech - while Android may have started as a vision, its purchase was a result of the need for mobile OS, Youtube guy wanted a place to publish videos, Chrome originating from Webkit is definitely not a cool tech, more like Google didn't have enough strength/balls to go with Mozilla while having pressing need for a browser to control, Maps and GMail were significant improvement upon existing user experience, while in contrast Google Wave for example was cool tech for completely new, from scratch user experience.

dehrmann 8y ago

> You can't start with a cool technology and build a product / user experience around it; you have to start with a vision of a coherent user experience, and build the technology around _that_. That's another way of saying don't build-out solutions looking for problems.