4 ms·

Call me skeptical, but I'm not convinced by Google's partial rollout of their new social layer. A while ago they rolled out the new top-bar and a little later

Call me skeptical, but I'm not convinced by Google's partial rollout of their new social layer. A while ago they rolled out the new top-bar and a little later they rolled out the new profiles and now this. It all kind of makes sense, but there is no killer app/driver for all these features. The number of integration points seems to be a problem, too. Until last week Google Mail, Reader and Groups all used different revisions of the "Google bar" on top. Disabling Google Buzz in Gmail also removes your new shiny profile, etc.. I'm anxious to see where this is going.

abraham 16y ago
Google as a whole is the killer app. They are just finally getting around to iterating through integrating their different products together.
anigbrowl 16y ago
Likely it will continue to be a trickle of small iterative improvements rather than big launches. Buzz and Wave were both presented as The Hot New Thing and both got a very cold shoulder from the general consumer market. Modesty and momentum seem to be key elements in Google's brand perception; the fact that you hardly ever see ads for Google on TV or other mass media is part of what differentiated the firm from Microsoft or Yahoo in the past. More importantly, while having frequent minor upgrades on a wide variety of 'beta' software services gives some a feeling that 'nothing is ever finished,' it means that Google is not fighting for brand recognition with its products in most markets. Although there are several products, such as Sketchup, which are offered 'by Google' but have a separate brand, they're generally aimed at a small niche. Orkut is the only product I can think of that has a really large market (in Brazil) but is not obviously Google-branded in the way that Google Earth or Gmail are. 'Microsoft search' obviously wasn't working so they needed something different and settled on 'Bing!' - though they missed a trick by not using a variety of happy-sounding audio icons in the TV commercials and (optionally!) on the product itself. Intel's signature 'tune' has been a very successful element of their brand, and Microsoft had an opportunity to positively extend the host brand but instead opted to develop a new one in purely verbal terms. Their marketing team did a fairly good job - it could have become an embarrassing joke if they had not - but this year they're doing the same thing with the new slogan of 'to the cloud!' And of course, every 3-4 years they have to remind the general public that their computers are mostly running Windows. You get the impression that Microsoft is vaguely embarrassed by its own name and its 1980s literalism, and so it hides behind a variety of hipper-sounding product offerings like an awkward parent at a youth club. Google is colorful and seemingly omnipresent, Apple is a healthy fruit with an iBrand, and IBM sounds so important that a quarter of the country probably thinks its part of the government. Yahoo...well, this says everything I feel about Yahoo's brand management: http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/25/yahoos-404-at-giants-stadium/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/25/yahoos-404-at-giants-stadiu... It's been there for years now, and I still snicker every single time I watch a Giants game. OK, only 1% of the public may be amused by such things, but the other 99% notice the reactions of the people who build/run/fix their computers, much as people listen to auto mechanics more closely than auto salesmen. that company is in dire, dire need of a brand makeover.

abraham 16y ago

Google as a whole is the killer app. They are just finally getting around to iterating through integrating their different products together.

anigbrowl 16y ago

Likely it will continue to be a trickle of small iterative improvements rather than big launches. Buzz and Wave were both presented as The Hot New Thing and both got a very cold shoulder from the general consumer market. Modesty and momentum seem to be key elements in Google's brand perception; the fact that you hardly ever see ads for Google on TV or other mass media is part of what differentiated the firm from Microsoft or Yahoo in the past. More importantly, while having frequent minor upgrades on a wide variety of 'beta' software services gives some a feeling that 'nothing is ever finished,' it means that Google is not fighting for brand recognition with its products in most markets. Although there are several products, such as Sketchup, which are offered 'by Google' but have a separate brand, they're generally aimed at a small niche. Orkut is the only product I can think of that has a really large market (in Brazil) but is not obviously Google-branded in the way that Google Earth or Gmail are. 'Microsoft search' obviously wasn't working so they needed something different and settled on 'Bing!' - though they missed a trick by not using a variety of happy-sounding audio icons in the TV commercials and (optionally!) on the product itself. Intel's signature 'tune' has been a very successful element of their brand, and Microsoft had an opportunity to positively extend the host brand but instead opted to develop a new one in purely verbal terms. Their marketing team did a fairly good job - it could have become an embarrassing joke if they had not - but this year they're doing the same thing with the new slogan of 'to the cloud!' And of course, every 3-4 years they have to remind the general public that their computers are mostly running Windows. You get the impression that Microsoft is vaguely embarrassed by its own name and its 1980s literalism, and so it hides behind a variety of hipper-sounding product offerings like an awkward parent at a youth club. Google is colorful and seemingly omnipresent, Apple is a healthy fruit with an iBrand, and IBM sounds so important that a quarter of the country probably thinks its part of the government. Yahoo...well, this says everything I feel about Yahoo's brand management: http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/25/yahoos-404-at-giants-stadium/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/25/yahoos-404-at-giants-stadiu... It's been there for years now, and I still snicker every single time I watch a Giants game. OK, only 1% of the public may be amused by such things, but the other 99% notice the reactions of the people who build/run/fix their computers, much as people listen to auto mechanics more closely than auto salesmen. that company is in dire, dire need of a brand makeover.