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Google often seems to have the attitude "if we build it, they will come, and if they don't, the idea was never feasible in the first place". I think Google has
by CommieBobDole 7y ago
Google often seems to have the attitude "if we build it, they will come, and if they don't, the idea was never feasible in the first place".
I think Google has to some extent been crippled by their search success - they built something and everybody came and uses it with little or no promotion or support, and its fantastic profitability has colored their view of everything else they try - if it's not an immediate massive success (and at Google, something that makes a hundred million in profit every year is generally not even worth the trouble), they lose interest and the people internally working on it disperse to other projects with better prospects.
They have the best hammer in the world, and it's cost them the ability to see anything that's not a nail.
- wolco 7y agoGoogle's easy to sunset policy makes them an easy target in any industry that isn't ripe for change or that provide any setbacks. If the going gets tough Google exits. Google's size gives them a big advantage that they never figure out how to use it.
- kubanczyk 7y ago> Google's size gives them a big advantage that they never figure out how to use it. Good for us consumers, isn't it?
- Nasrudith 7y agoLike any tool it depends on how they use it. Leaving the abusive fiefdoms of others in place doesn't help consumers. It is a matter of nuance essentially. Google and all competitors may do things good, bad, or both for consumers and their size doesn't have much to do with it.
- BurningFrog 7y agoI think/suspect/speculate that since Google has search/ads billions raining from the sky, nothing else it does really matters to them. So all side projects are done kinda like a hobby.
- wpietri 7y agoMakes sense to me. And I think another factor is that with ads, users are the product, not the customer. If customer service is the foundation of a business, it drives a certain attention on the individual experience of every user, and there's a real incentive to be a customer's #1 choice by the customer's own criteria. But Google's relationship with the userbase is statistical, not individual. As along as enough people look at their ads, that's good enough. They were never intending to please everybody, and so don't really have to pay attention to the details. So it's entirely unsurprising to me that they're failing at gaming, which is very much about delivering amazing individual experiences to one's chosen niche. Ditto their failure in social networking. In both cases they built something that sounded good on paper and could be adequate for some people, but never succeeded in being truly great for enough people to capture an audience.
- icebraining 7y agoGoogle built a pretty successful social network, which even grew faster than Facebook for the first half decade. And like with their messaging services, they then decided it was better to just create a new one from scratch rather than trying to work with what already successful.
- dillonmckay 7y agoOrkut?
- icebraining 7y agoYeah.
- wpietri 7y agoOrkut? I'm not sure we can really count that as something Google created. As I recall, it was a single engineer's side project based on work he did previous to Google. Sure, Google did sort of adopt it. But as you say, it got pushed aside.
- 7y ago
- MarkMc 7y ago> Google often seems to have the attitude "if we build it, they will come, and if they don't, the idea was never feasible in the first place". This comment echoes Paul Graham's observation about the wrong attitude founders often have about initial growth [1]: "A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist." [1] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
- tzhu 7y agoForgot about http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html. Great post and relevant as ever today.
- muse900 7y agoI wouldn't say that directly applies to what Google is trying to do. I think what Google is doing is just re-investing back into x amount of companies/ideas where even if 1-2 of those companies bounces back and becomes profitable they make up their investments + they make profit. I think they do realise how much money there is to be made in the gaming world and such. Its just time and money against profit for them. Throw eggs in the wall and see what sticks or not. Personally I don't like that model and thats why I use google services less and less. Even gmail is a huge no-go for me due to their nonexistent support.
- Fr0styMatt88 7y agoIt's funny though, I remember the old days before Google and they built something that was demonstrably superior for their users than what was out there at the time. They did win with a superior product. Stadia feels like something that got designed by asking "how can we make something that's worse for our users than the other alternatives that are out there now?" and then going and building that. Now had they come out with virtual machines better than what anyone could get at home, maybe? Don't get me wrong though; I'm sure a lot of this is death by a thousand compromises. As a side note: I was watching the Product Keynote from Flutter Interact '19 and when the person from the Stadia team was speaking about their app, it reminded me that despite all the negativity Stadia is getting, we should remember that there are real people building it that are enthusiastic about what they're doing and trying to make something good.
- rosybox 7y agoiirc Google Maps was initially not a success. MapQuest had a majority market share of online maps up until the release of the iPhone. So they floundered for about a year or two. https://www.businessinsider.com/mapquest-a-symbol-of-everything-thats-gone-wrong-2009-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/mapquest-a-symbol-of-everyth...