Focus.
The death of Google Wave got me to thinking about what all Google is into these days. Here’s a list I threw together:
- Advertising (online/offline/mobile)
- Mobile phones
- Desktop computing
- Music
- Video
- Books
- Search
- Social networking
- File storage
- Document management
- Spreadsheets
- Presentation software
- Social gaming
- Translation
- ecommerce
- Mapping
- Health records
- News
- Blogging
- Photo sharing
- Instant messaging
- Telephony
- 3D Modeling
- Browsers
- Code sharing/ storage
- Hosting
- Calendars
- Scholarly documents and articles
- RSS reading
- Website statistics
- DNS
- Patent search
- Application hosting
- Encyclopedic information (Wikipedia like)
Being into that many things as a company is surely going to create some duds. So is the “Make lots of stuff, and see what sticks” a viable way to run a long term business? Does it eventually create frustration, and mistrust in your users when you don’t wholeheartedly commit to everything you make?
You forgot space:) http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/meet-googles-space-commander/
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“So is the “Make lots of stuff, and see what sticks” a viable way to run a long term business? “
Consider all this Google’s internal VC fund. If you figure a project requires 10 engineers and each engineer costs $200K a year, then that’s $2 million per year per project. If they have 20 projects a year, then that’s 40 million a year – a drop in the bucker for Google – they take a flier on something with potential for big gains and overall, it’s a small price to pay to demonstrate to your ambitious, talented workforce that you’re willing to go out on a limb and take risks.
Even if you want to tack on another 40 million to the development costs, we’re still not talking huge sums on a per project basis compared to the costs manufacturing firms put into new products
Gabe, I’m not arguing that it can’t be profitable short term. I just wonder what the long term effect is. Let’s say there are X users who are enticed into using a Google service based on brand credibility. When the service is half-baked, or shut down pre-emptively how many people lose respect for the brand based on the poor experience? 1%? 5%? OK, now multiply that times 10 new “experiments” a year. Now multiply that times 10 years. 20 years. For the most part I’m a Google fan, but I do worry they do more harm than good by allowing their “experiments” into the wild. At the very least they should be more forthcoming about what is a strong initiative, and what is a hobby.
I would agree with the mistrust thing if they released Wave as a full out product, but it was in “preview” (not even alpha or beta) for almost all of its life in the wild. I know that Google puts badges like that on all their products when they first release them, but in this case I think they were extra careful to make sure people were aware that it was really just an experiment. I was always looking at Wave as a really complex tech demo of the things HTML5 could do – it was one of the first big mainstream HTML5 web apps.
Also, I think Google made a very calculated judgement call with this. We all know that Wave really fell short in its adoption. If it had taken off and was being used in the main workflow of a lot of people, I don’t think they would have dropped support for it for fear of a large public backlash. On Twitter the response has mostly been “well, finally” rather than regret or annoyance. Everyone recognized Wave was a valiant effort that wasn’t working. Companies don’t often give up on products they spent a lot of money on, and I think if Google saw any light at the end of the tunnel for Wave they would have kept it alive.
I don’t think it hurts Google’s credibility to admit “we thought this would be really cool, it’s not working, we messed up.” I’d much rather companies admit they messed up and move on than take the Apple route (most likely “this is so cool you all were stupid for not using it when it was out there”). I give them a lot of credit for ceasing development on it, rather than drag it sadly along way past its lifespan.
Ryan, -really well thought out response. You’re of course totally right that when you fail you should admit it honestly, and move on. You can actually gain respect by doing it like that. But Wave was only one example really -the freshest one. What about the other 75 things Google is into now? Are they going to be able to be really truly great at all of them? Shouldn’t they maybe do fewer things, but do those things really well? The decisions to fail in public(Google) or fail in private(Apple) may be an internal politics thing, or an honesty thing… But what about working to create a situation where failing is less likely in the first place?
I guess the mark of a great company is its willingness to take risks. Playing it safe is normal. Risk taking is extraordinary.
It’s an absolutely good point Arnold. I hope Paste always takes risks, and goes with our gut. This job would cease to be fun if we didn’t. But… I can’t even tell you how many projects we’ve killed internally this year because they didn’t live up to our standards. Not just dabbling half day efforts, -sometimes many months worth of development down the drain. Not because we quit, or not (hopefully) because we lacked vision, – but because we pursued it far enough to know if we could be proud of it. It’s something I hope every company does. It comes from being an ombudsman for your customer at the last minute. No matter how many hours, no matter how many egos, if we can’t go to sleep at night thinking it’s going to make a positive dent in our user’s lives, we don’t put it out. That’s not to say everything we do is perfect, -but we’re setting our standards at a certain level regardless of our resources. Since Google is a couple billion times bigger than we are, -are they killing a couple billion more projects a year that we are?
Chairman Gruber weighs in. http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/08/06/google-wave-failure