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Google is making the same mistakes Microsoft made. Trying to enter into every industry it can thinking it can use it's monopoly power to take over the world. Re

Google is making the same mistakes Microsoft made. Trying to enter into every industry it can thinking it can use it's monopoly power to take over the world. Reality: Doing 20 things mediocrely is not as profitable of doing 2 things very very well. Result: 1) Constant experiments and dropped products (just like Microsoft). 2) Consumers no longer trust your services to stick around and no longer even invest in your platforms (*see most of Microsoft's offerings). 3) The services you do have aren't the highest quality and your brand takes a hit as being "giant mediocre corporation" like Microsoft instead of "high quality company" like Apple. The more things change the more they stay the same.

_pmf_ 13y ago
> 1) Constant experiments and dropped products (just like Microsoft). > 3) The services you do have aren't the highest quality and your brand takes a hit as being "giant mediocre corporation" like Microsoft instead of "high quality company" like Apple. Yes, Apple never creates duds; we are all happily using our Newton.
- silverlake 13y ago
  And Ping. :)
dragonwriter 13y ago
> Reality: Doing 20 things mediocrely is not as profitable of doing 2 things very very well. Reality also is that there is often a declining marginal value in additional investments in the same area once you are already doing very well in that area, and that the marginal profit from doing something else mediocre may be greater than the marginal profit from doing the existing thing a tiny bit better. And lots of Google's experiments that are outside of what are understood to be its core strengths when they are introduced end up as things that are at the top of their field: Gmail and Chrome, for instance, weren't at the center of what Google did when they were introduced.
- MatthewPhillips 13y ago
  I would posit that Google isn't doing well in search from a quality perspective, but obviously they are doing very well from a market share perspective. This just means they are ripe for disruption.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >I would posit that Google isn't doing well in search from a quality perspective That would only be true if there was a search engine with better quality results. I agree that Google has dropped it's quality (compared to itself) but it's still better than anything else.
    - MatthewPhillips 13y ago
      That's a myopic way to look at it, in my opinion. If there is a quality deficit in search Google is in the best position to remedy it. And if they don't, someone else eventually will. As the parent pointed out, there isn't much marginal value in adding investment in an area that you are dominating. And this is almost always the downfall of market leaders.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > I would posit that Google isn't doing well in search from a quality perspective, but obviously they are doing very well from a market share perspective. This just means they are ripe for disruption. By what standard? If its just your personal subjective interpretation, it just means that someone has an opportunity to steal you away as a consumer. If there really is a broadly-shared, unmet need among Google's current consumer base that is both technically feasible to address and easier to address in a new platform (either technically or for social -- e.g., for organizational inertia reasons) than it would be for Google to implement in their own services, then, yes, Google is ripe for disruption. But lots of people (including people selling rival search engines sponsored by deep pockets rivals) have been saying that since shortly after Google became the dominant search engine, so unless you are going to spend the effort to either make a credible case as to the specific unmet need that supports your claim that Google is ripe for disruption (and "I would posit that Google isn't doing well in search from a quality perspective" is the polar opposite of "specific" here) or, better yet, show me the MVP of your product that not only identifies the unmet need but demonstrates the feasibility of meeting it, I don't see much substance to your position.
deleted 13y ago
ConceitedCode 13y ago
Yes, but it seems to me like they are trying to correct those issues quickly.
myko 13y ago
Except they seem to be doing a great job jumping into new products and services? Google Wallet looks like a big improvement over their old system.
- darklajid 13y ago
  Google Wallet looks like a big improvement over their old system. I'm not trying to be a dick: How?
  - myko 13y ago
    I said looks like because as a developer I haven't used Checkout vs Wallet APIs, but people I've spoken with have told me Wallet is a lot easier to work with. Also Wallet is already on millions of consumer devices and likely has far more users already in their system. This doesn't mean it wouldn't have been better to merge the two products, but seeing as they are disparate systems Wallet looks like the superior of the two.
pvnick 13y ago
This seems to be a mistake that a ton of startups make as well. It's a result of indecisive (read:poor) management and inevitably leads to doing nothing particularly well. One company that I've seen not fall into this trap is Dropbox. Dropbox offers one amazing service and pours all it's efforts into that, and from what I hear they have some insanely smart people working there doing that. As a result they can afford to decline a $6 billion offer from Google and then go on to compete against Google's inferior offering.
- threeseed 13y ago
  Question. Do you actually use Dropbox ? Because for me it is one of the most overrated services I use. They haven't actually done anything new to the product since the beginning and the CPU load when syncing is still ridiculously high. IMHO The only reason Dropbox is successful because the alternatives e.g. SkyDrive, Google Drive are so much worse.
  - oblique63 13y ago
    If you don't mind me asking, how is Drive much worse? I agree about Dropbox, but I don't think Drive is any worse. If anything the experience I've had with it has been more positive for the simple fact that it integrates with the existing google services I use a lot better (i.e. attachments in gmail). But I don't think it would be fair for me to hold that against Dropbox. Additionally, I haven't had much time with the OSX Drive client, as I work mostly in windows currently, but that seems to work fine as well. The biggest gripe I've had with anything Drive-related, has been Google's 'Keep' losing some data from notes I made on my phone while I had a tab open with Keep on my laptop. Apparently my phone didn't get a chance to sync properly before I touched my computer again, so it just totally discarded everything I did on my phone. That was annoying, but it's not really something I associate with Drive specifically, since it still seems like an experimental side project they could potentially kill off at any point.
    - threeseed 13y ago
      As I mentioned below Google Drive loses data and is unacceptably buggy. Just see the product forums for the countless examples of it happening. I see no reason why you wouldn't go with Dropbox. Even just for the fact that you shouldn't rely on anything from Google that doesn't have or is related to advertising.
mtgx 13y ago
Completely agree. I'm so disappointed in Google for having Checkout for years and not doing anything serious with it. I really wanted it to become a serious alternative to Paypal. But it's like they never even tried. And it turned out to be huge mistake for them because they could've really used Checkout accounts from day one of Android, to get people to pay for Android apps. I still believe this has been one of the biggest obstacles on Android, because you need Google Wallet (which is brand new service, I guess) account to pay for apps, and obviously the vast majority of people didn't have one, and didn't bother to make one either, and they'd rather look for the free alternative of the app. It's been getting a bit better since Android 4.0, since they are asking everyone to make an account at the set-up, but they are still behind, and it could've been much better early on if Checkout was popular.
- ryguytilidie 13y ago
  As someone who used to recruit for Google, and watched the team recruit THOUSANDS of developers only to discontinue product after product, wtf are these guys all doing?
  - johnpmayer 13y ago
    Creating incredibly complicated advertising auction houses to the point of academic economic masturbation.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- cremnob 13y ago
  They haven't done anything with Google Finance either, and bugs seem to go a long time before they're fixed.
  - astrodust 13y ago
    Seems like they'll close all outstanding bugs by shutting that down, too.
- 13y ago
slg 13y ago
Not that I disagree with your basic premise but I wonder why some companies get away with this type of thing and others don't. Your example of Apple is an obvious one but they have plenty of "failures" on their hands as well. Whether it is something that is dead on arrival like Ping or the company letting one of its old marquee products die a slow death like the MacPro or iPod classic, Apple seems to be able to brush off these issues like no one else.
- 2muchcoffeeman 13y ago
  The services Apple kills are usually rubbish. Ping, Mobile Me, those iPod speakers. Google is killing things that are actually good. I think that is where the Reader backlash came from. Reader was good even if the relative popularity was low. Hardware is kind of a different thing. The iPod was pretty nice. But now I want a shinier iPod with more features. Production of the Classic just has to match demand from those with niche uses for it. So a slow death makes sense? Not sure what the situation is with the MacPro...
- jfb 13y ago
  I think it's different when there're concrete numbers that the company can use to inform their decisions. Apple only does profitable things; if they kill a product, it's because it's no longer making them enough money.
rasterizer 13y ago
That comment reads more like reflex than anything with much thought put behind it: "Google is closing a service; Google is the new Microsoft" that old tired cliche. First of all it's far form an unexpected announcement seeing as they have been developing another payment service in parallel, and second "monopoly" is a specific legal term, it shouldn't thrown around lightly, it's not just another synonym for "big". As for your points: 1) Experimentation is net positive, and by definition most of said experiments will fail. You can't really be any sort of a self respecting tech company if you shun experimentation. 2) This is anecdotal, they have a selection of core products and when a peripheral one gets deprecated it's done through a reasonable process as spelled out in that post. 3) That's subjective.
ConAntonakos 13y ago
Yes, but they're constantly iterating, reviewing, and consolidating. While I agree that Google is tangling itself in many products, I don't think it's going the route of Windows. I enjoy using Google products; I can't say the same for MSoft.
rogerbinns 13y ago
4) It annoys the people who do use your product especially if they were already happy with it. Chances are they were the early adopters and evangelists. Their voices are what leads to #2 amplifying the actions.
voltagex_ 13y ago
And now I have to work harder to avoid PayPal. I think I'm going to start looking into my email setup, just in case.
igul222 13y ago
I disagree. Google's recent efforts to narrow its focus (i.e. Google+, killing Reader) have been miserable failures. Being able to do 50 things at once, on the other hand, lets them come up with truly groundbreaking things like Glass and the self-driving car.
- Fixnum 13y ago
  Google didn't exactly invent the self-driving car - they basically bought the Stanford team and some people from CMU and elsewhere.
  - patrickk 13y ago
    > they basically bought the Stanford team and some people from CMU and elsewhere. Also, the original impetus came from the DARPA grand challenge. However, Google do deserve credit for recognising that self-driving cars could have a massive positive impact on society, and bringing the various team members under one roof and funding them would bring the concept from the research lab to the road a lot quicker. I bet many car makers have stepped up their self-driving cars efforts in response to the Google advances. There's numerous companies and organisations that had the resources to bring the likes of Sebastian Thrun into their fold to work on self-driving cars, but Google were the ones with the vision to actually do it.
damoncali 13y ago
I think it's more the opposite. Google, hyped up on IPO endorphins and VC DNA went out and tried to conquer the world, despite not having a distinct advantages in the businesses it was getting into. The results have been lackluster in many cases (but not all). They probably overdid it. Good on them for realizing that and putting a bullet in some of these efforts. Many companies don't have the courage to do that.
jacques_chester 13y ago
> Google is making the same mistakes Microsoft made. Trying to enter into every industry it can thinking it can use it's monopoly power to take over the world. I call this the Spaghetti Cannon strategy. Load up a cannon with cash and different ideas, blow up the cash and see what sticks to the wall. If we redrew the corporate boundaries of Google and Microsoft, we'd see them as investment firms tasked with turning a reliable long term cashflows into new reliable long term cashflows. Quasi-venture firms. So far, Google has advertising. And that's it. Microsoft have Windows, Office, Server & Tools and Xbox. So in actual fact, Microsoft are proving that yeah, it sorta works. Sorta.
- jemeshsu 13y ago
  Apparently this strategy seems to work also for hardware. Look at Samsung.
  - astrodust 13y ago
    Samsung is focusing on a much smaller number of devices than they used to. Yes, they have more than Apple, but they also spend way more on advertising to make up for it. Instead of hundreds of phones, they have maybe a dozen now that they actively promote. Right now I can't leave the house without being bombarded by Samsung advertising, they're in some kind of feverish campaign over their new Note phone-tablet-thing.
    - Blara 13y ago
      And TV:s, fridges, computers... They manufacture more than just phones you know.
      - astrodust 13y ago
        They don't dominate any market like they do Android phones. Are 90% of all fridges sold made by Samsung?
    - mtgx 13y ago
      They are actually turning back to that. The are at least 5 new different variants coming up of their S4 "flagship": S4 regular, S4 Google Edition, S4 Mini, S4 Active, S4 Zoom, S4 Mega. And that's just for one "phone brand". Imagine if they do this to every other phone brand of theirs, which are already being called all "Galaxy". Samsung strategy is becoming a mess again. It will work in the short term (a year or so), and then backfire badly.
greggman 13y ago
Um, did you read the post or just the headline. Aren't they just replacing Google Checkout with Google Wallet and isn't Google Wallet better than Google Checkout? It sounds like an upgrade to me. What am I missing? Is it just a messaging problem? If they had instead said "We're renaming Google Checkout to Google Wallet. We're introducing API v2. API v1 is deprecated and will be turned off in 6 months so upgrade your apps." would that have changed your response?
- jebblue 13y ago
  Actually that would have been a more logical way to put it. edit: IOW I agree with you.
- rgbrenner 13y ago
  No, that is not accurate. Google Checkout processes payments for the merchant, and Google deposits the funds in the merchant's bank account. With the new system, Google has an API to give you the users information, but the merchant must have some way of processing the payment. So these two are not the same at all. I can tell you for my ecommerce site, I intend to drop Google Wallet altogether.. After the numerous Froogle/Google shopping api changes, I have no hope that the new api will stick around for any reasonable amount of time. So I just don't think it's worth the effort. Edit: for comparison to Google Checkout, I get roughly 15x the number of orders with PayPal.. and 25x the number of orders from Visa/MC/Dscv/Amex. Google's implementation of Checkout was flawed from the start (esp how they handled/treated merchants).. So I'm not surprised it didn't go anywhere.
  - mehta 13y ago
    > Google's implementation of Checkout was flawed from the start (esp how they handled/treated merchants).. So I'm not surprised it didn't go anywhere. As you say, Google's implementation was flawed from start. Doesn't it make sense then to fix it and make things right?
    - rgbrenner 13y ago
      I'm all for Google fixing things and making their service(s) better.. but.... I have no idea if Wallet is better than Checkout, since I haven't used Wallet. For all I know Google made the same mistakes with that service as well. But the biggest reason I don't plan to go along with Wallet: the complete neglect of Checkout. Checkout launched in 2006. I signed up around 2008. Want to know how many improvements Google has made to the service (excluding minor policy changes)? The answer is 0. The service never changed as far as I could tell. Google never fixed a single issue with their interface. They never fixed the major policy issues. Shortly after Wallet launched in 2011, Google renamed part of the service: When consumers buy an item using Checkout, they are using Google Wallet. So these services are not completely unrelated. I would not be surprised if Google kept many of their policies and other problems... It does sound like Google has given Wallet a lot more attention than they did Checkout. But I also remember the hype they gave Checkout when it launched.. and this in many ways feels similar. Checkout could have been quite good. It could have competed with PayPal (like they wanted it to).. It was probably 90% of the way there... but instead of improving the service, they did nothing with it for 5 years.. then they developed a replacement.. and now they're telling everyone on Checkout that it's dead, and they should move to a new, but very similar service.
fakeer 13y ago
There's Google Wallet and recently I'e purchased LastPass premium using that, outside Google's shops I mean. So, they just thought it's better to have either of the two - Checkout or Wallet.
GigabyteCoin 13y ago
I disagree on some levels. I think the amount of innovation and creativity that Google pushes for is amazing. What if Checkout was the next big thing? At least they tried it and can put it in the history books now. I do agree with point number 2, that they are making their services seem "legitimate" too quickly. Personally I would move them back to their Google Labs days to solve that problem. Where they would make a larger point of this service being in BETA and possibly not a long term goal. From there if it passes BETA just streamline it, make it profitable, and keep it for as long as possible. Perhaps that's what they're doing, but seeing a headline on HN every few days about "X Google Service Shutting Down" is incredibly disheartening and damaging to their brand, I agree completely on that one. EDIT: The "Go Programming Language was first designed and developed at Google Inc." according to wikipedia. And we all love Go on HN. So it's hit and miss just like anything else, but godspeed to them for trying!
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

_pmf_ 13y ago

> 1) Constant experiments and dropped products (just like Microsoft). > 3) The services you do have aren't the highest quality and your brand takes a hit as being "giant mediocre corporation" like Microsoft instead of "high quality company" like Apple. Yes, Apple never creates duds; we are all happily using our Newton.

silverlake 13y ago
And Ping. :)

dragonwriter 13y ago

> Reality: Doing 20 things mediocrely is not as profitable of doing 2 things very very well. Reality also is that there is often a declining marginal value in additional investments in the same area once you are already doing very well in that area, and that the marginal profit from doing something else mediocre may be greater than the marginal profit from doing the existing thing a tiny bit better. And lots of Google's experiments that are outside of what are understood to be its core strengths when they are introduced end up as things that are at the top of their field: Gmail and Chrome, for instance, weren't at the center of what Google did when they were introduced.

MatthewPhillips 13y ago
I would posit that Google isn't doing well in search from a quality perspective, but obviously they are doing very well from a market share perspective. This just means they are ripe for disruption.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >I would posit that Google isn't doing well in search from a quality perspective That would only be true if there was a search engine with better quality results. I agree that Google has dropped it's quality (compared to itself) but it's still better than anything else.
  - MatthewPhillips 13y ago
    That's a myopic way to look at it, in my opinion. If there is a quality deficit in search Google is in the best position to remedy it. And if they don't, someone else eventually will. As the parent pointed out, there isn't much marginal value in adding investment in an area that you are dominating. And this is almost always the downfall of market leaders.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > I would posit that Google isn't doing well in search from a quality perspective, but obviously they are doing very well from a market share perspective. This just means they are ripe for disruption. By what standard? If its just your personal subjective interpretation, it just means that someone has an opportunity to steal you away as a consumer. If there really is a broadly-shared, unmet need among Google's current consumer base that is both technically feasible to address and easier to address in a new platform (either technically or for social -- e.g., for organizational inertia reasons) than it would be for Google to implement in their own services, then, yes, Google is ripe for disruption. But lots of people (including people selling rival search engines sponsored by deep pockets rivals) have been saying that since shortly after Google became the dominant search engine, so unless you are going to spend the effort to either make a credible case as to the specific unmet need that supports your claim that Google is ripe for disruption (and "I would posit that Google isn't doing well in search from a quality perspective" is the polar opposite of "specific" here) or, better yet, show me the MVP of your product that not only identifies the unmet need but demonstrates the feasibility of meeting it, I don't see much substance to your position.

deleted 13y ago

ConceitedCode 13y ago

Yes, but it seems to me like they are trying to correct those issues quickly.

myko 13y ago

Except they seem to be doing a great job jumping into new products and services? Google Wallet looks like a big improvement over their old system.

darklajid 13y ago
Google Wallet looks like a big improvement over their old system. I'm not trying to be a dick: How?
- myko 13y ago
  I said looks like because as a developer I haven't used Checkout vs Wallet APIs, but people I've spoken with have told me Wallet is a lot easier to work with. Also Wallet is already on millions of consumer devices and likely has far more users already in their system. This doesn't mean it wouldn't have been better to merge the two products, but seeing as they are disparate systems Wallet looks like the superior of the two.

pvnick 13y ago

This seems to be a mistake that a ton of startups make as well. It's a result of indecisive (read:poor) management and inevitably leads to doing nothing particularly well. One company that I've seen not fall into this trap is Dropbox. Dropbox offers one amazing service and pours all it's efforts into that, and from what I hear they have some insanely smart people working there doing that. As a result they can afford to decline a $6 billion offer from Google and then go on to compete against Google's inferior offering.

threeseed 13y ago
Question. Do you actually use Dropbox ? Because for me it is one of the most overrated services I use. They haven't actually done anything new to the product since the beginning and the CPU load when syncing is still ridiculously high. IMHO The only reason Dropbox is successful because the alternatives e.g. SkyDrive, Google Drive are so much worse.
- oblique63 13y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, how is Drive much worse? I agree about Dropbox, but I don't think Drive is any worse. If anything the experience I've had with it has been more positive for the simple fact that it integrates with the existing google services I use a lot better (i.e. attachments in gmail). But I don't think it would be fair for me to hold that against Dropbox. Additionally, I haven't had much time with the OSX Drive client, as I work mostly in windows currently, but that seems to work fine as well. The biggest gripe I've had with anything Drive-related, has been Google's 'Keep' losing some data from notes I made on my phone while I had a tab open with Keep on my laptop. Apparently my phone didn't get a chance to sync properly before I touched my computer again, so it just totally discarded everything I did on my phone. That was annoying, but it's not really something I associate with Drive specifically, since it still seems like an experimental side project they could potentially kill off at any point.
  - threeseed 13y ago
    As I mentioned below Google Drive loses data and is unacceptably buggy. Just see the product forums for the countless examples of it happening. I see no reason why you wouldn't go with Dropbox. Even just for the fact that you shouldn't rely on anything from Google that doesn't have or is related to advertising.

mtgx 13y ago

Completely agree. I'm so disappointed in Google for having Checkout for years and not doing anything serious with it. I really wanted it to become a serious alternative to Paypal. But it's like they never even tried. And it turned out to be huge mistake for them because they could've really used Checkout accounts from day one of Android, to get people to pay for Android apps. I still believe this has been one of the biggest obstacles on Android, because you need Google Wallet (which is brand new service, I guess) account to pay for apps, and obviously the vast majority of people didn't have one, and didn't bother to make one either, and they'd rather look for the free alternative of the app. It's been getting a bit better since Android 4.0, since they are asking everyone to make an account at the set-up, but they are still behind, and it could've been much better early on if Checkout was popular.

ryguytilidie 13y ago
As someone who used to recruit for Google, and watched the team recruit THOUSANDS of developers only to discontinue product after product, wtf are these guys all doing?
- johnpmayer 13y ago
  Creating incredibly complicated advertising auction houses to the point of academic economic masturbation.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
cremnob 13y ago
They haven't done anything with Google Finance either, and bugs seem to go a long time before they're fixed.
- astrodust 13y ago
  Seems like they'll close all outstanding bugs by shutting that down, too.
13y ago

slg 13y ago

Not that I disagree with your basic premise but I wonder why some companies get away with this type of thing and others don't. Your example of Apple is an obvious one but they have plenty of "failures" on their hands as well. Whether it is something that is dead on arrival like Ping or the company letting one of its old marquee products die a slow death like the MacPro or iPod classic, Apple seems to be able to brush off these issues like no one else.

2muchcoffeeman 13y ago
The services Apple kills are usually rubbish. Ping, Mobile Me, those iPod speakers. Google is killing things that are actually good. I think that is where the Reader backlash came from. Reader was good even if the relative popularity was low. Hardware is kind of a different thing. The iPod was pretty nice. But now I want a shinier iPod with more features. Production of the Classic just has to match demand from those with niche uses for it. So a slow death makes sense? Not sure what the situation is with the MacPro...
jfb 13y ago
I think it's different when there're concrete numbers that the company can use to inform their decisions. Apple only does profitable things; if they kill a product, it's because it's no longer making them enough money.

rasterizer 13y ago

That comment reads more like reflex than anything with much thought put behind it: "Google is closing a service; Google is the new Microsoft" that old tired cliche. First of all it's far form an unexpected announcement seeing as they have been developing another payment service in parallel, and second "monopoly" is a specific legal term, it shouldn't thrown around lightly, it's not just another synonym for "big". As for your points: 1) Experimentation is net positive, and by definition most of said experiments will fail. You can't really be any sort of a self respecting tech company if you shun experimentation. 2) This is anecdotal, they have a selection of core products and when a peripheral one gets deprecated it's done through a reasonable process as spelled out in that post. 3) That's subjective.

ConAntonakos 13y ago

Yes, but they're constantly iterating, reviewing, and consolidating. While I agree that Google is tangling itself in many products, I don't think it's going the route of Windows. I enjoy using Google products; I can't say the same for MSoft.

rogerbinns 13y ago

4) It annoys the people who do use your product especially if they were already happy with it. Chances are they were the early adopters and evangelists. Their voices are what leads to #2 amplifying the actions.

voltagex_ 13y ago

And now I have to work harder to avoid PayPal. I think I'm going to start looking into my email setup, just in case.

igul222 13y ago

I disagree. Google's recent efforts to narrow its focus (i.e. Google+, killing Reader) have been miserable failures. Being able to do 50 things at once, on the other hand, lets them come up with truly groundbreaking things like Glass and the self-driving car.

Fixnum 13y ago
Google didn't exactly invent the self-driving car - they basically bought the Stanford team and some people from CMU and elsewhere.
- patrickk 13y ago
  > they basically bought the Stanford team and some people from CMU and elsewhere. Also, the original impetus came from the DARPA grand challenge. However, Google do deserve credit for recognising that self-driving cars could have a massive positive impact on society, and bringing the various team members under one roof and funding them would bring the concept from the research lab to the road a lot quicker. I bet many car makers have stepped up their self-driving cars efforts in response to the Google advances. There's numerous companies and organisations that had the resources to bring the likes of Sebastian Thrun into their fold to work on self-driving cars, but Google were the ones with the vision to actually do it.

damoncali 13y ago

I think it's more the opposite. Google, hyped up on IPO endorphins and VC DNA went out and tried to conquer the world, despite not having a distinct advantages in the businesses it was getting into. The results have been lackluster in many cases (but not all). They probably overdid it. Good on them for realizing that and putting a bullet in some of these efforts. Many companies don't have the courage to do that.

jacques_chester 13y ago

> Google is making the same mistakes Microsoft made. Trying to enter into every industry it can thinking it can use it's monopoly power to take over the world. I call this the Spaghetti Cannon strategy. Load up a cannon with cash and different ideas, blow up the cash and see what sticks to the wall. If we redrew the corporate boundaries of Google and Microsoft, we'd see them as investment firms tasked with turning a reliable long term cashflows into new reliable long term cashflows. Quasi-venture firms. So far, Google has advertising. And that's it. Microsoft have Windows, Office, Server & Tools and Xbox. So in actual fact, Microsoft are proving that yeah, it sorta works. Sorta.

jemeshsu 13y ago
Apparently this strategy seems to work also for hardware. Look at Samsung.
- astrodust 13y ago
  Samsung is focusing on a much smaller number of devices than they used to. Yes, they have more than Apple, but they also spend way more on advertising to make up for it. Instead of hundreds of phones, they have maybe a dozen now that they actively promote. Right now I can't leave the house without being bombarded by Samsung advertising, they're in some kind of feverish campaign over their new Note phone-tablet-thing.
  - Blara 13y ago
    And TV:s, fridges, computers... They manufacture more than just phones you know.
    - astrodust 13y ago
      They don't dominate any market like they do Android phones. Are 90% of all fridges sold made by Samsung?
  - mtgx 13y ago
    They are actually turning back to that. The are at least 5 new different variants coming up of their S4 "flagship": S4 regular, S4 Google Edition, S4 Mini, S4 Active, S4 Zoom, S4 Mega. And that's just for one "phone brand". Imagine if they do this to every other phone brand of theirs, which are already being called all "Galaxy". Samsung strategy is becoming a mess again. It will work in the short term (a year or so), and then backfire badly.

greggman 13y ago

Um, did you read the post or just the headline. Aren't they just replacing Google Checkout with Google Wallet and isn't Google Wallet better than Google Checkout? It sounds like an upgrade to me. What am I missing? Is it just a messaging problem? If they had instead said "We're renaming Google Checkout to Google Wallet. We're introducing API v2. API v1 is deprecated and will be turned off in 6 months so upgrade your apps." would that have changed your response?

jebblue 13y ago
Actually that would have been a more logical way to put it. edit: IOW I agree with you.
rgbrenner 13y ago
No, that is not accurate. Google Checkout processes payments for the merchant, and Google deposits the funds in the merchant's bank account. With the new system, Google has an API to give you the users information, but the merchant must have some way of processing the payment. So these two are not the same at all. I can tell you for my ecommerce site, I intend to drop Google Wallet altogether.. After the numerous Froogle/Google shopping api changes, I have no hope that the new api will stick around for any reasonable amount of time. So I just don't think it's worth the effort. Edit: for comparison to Google Checkout, I get roughly 15x the number of orders with PayPal.. and 25x the number of orders from Visa/MC/Dscv/Amex. Google's implementation of Checkout was flawed from the start (esp how they handled/treated merchants).. So I'm not surprised it didn't go anywhere.
- mehta 13y ago
  > Google's implementation of Checkout was flawed from the start (esp how they handled/treated merchants).. So I'm not surprised it didn't go anywhere. As you say, Google's implementation was flawed from start. Doesn't it make sense then to fix it and make things right?
  - rgbrenner 13y ago
    I'm all for Google fixing things and making their service(s) better.. but.... I have no idea if Wallet is better than Checkout, since I haven't used Wallet. For all I know Google made the same mistakes with that service as well. But the biggest reason I don't plan to go along with Wallet: the complete neglect of Checkout. Checkout launched in 2006. I signed up around 2008. Want to know how many improvements Google has made to the service (excluding minor policy changes)? The answer is 0. The service never changed as far as I could tell. Google never fixed a single issue with their interface. They never fixed the major policy issues. Shortly after Wallet launched in 2011, Google renamed part of the service: When consumers buy an item using Checkout, they are using Google Wallet. So these services are not completely unrelated. I would not be surprised if Google kept many of their policies and other problems... It does sound like Google has given Wallet a lot more attention than they did Checkout. But I also remember the hype they gave Checkout when it launched.. and this in many ways feels similar. Checkout could have been quite good. It could have competed with PayPal (like they wanted it to).. It was probably 90% of the way there... but instead of improving the service, they did nothing with it for 5 years.. then they developed a replacement.. and now they're telling everyone on Checkout that it's dead, and they should move to a new, but very similar service.

fakeer 13y ago

There's Google Wallet and recently I'e purchased LastPass premium using that, outside Google's shops I mean. So, they just thought it's better to have either of the two - Checkout or Wallet.

GigabyteCoin 13y ago

I disagree on some levels. I think the amount of innovation and creativity that Google pushes for is amazing. What if Checkout was the next big thing? At least they tried it and can put it in the history books now. I do agree with point number 2, that they are making their services seem "legitimate" too quickly. Personally I would move them back to their Google Labs days to solve that problem. Where they would make a larger point of this service being in BETA and possibly not a long term goal. From there if it passes BETA just streamline it, make it profitable, and keep it for as long as possible. Perhaps that's what they're doing, but seeing a headline on HN every few days about "X Google Service Shutting Down" is incredibly disheartening and damaging to their brand, I agree completely on that one. EDIT: The "Go Programming Language was first designed and developed at Google Inc." according to wikipedia. And we all love Go on HN. So it's hit and miss just like anything else, but godspeed to them for trying!

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