This post was originally published @ TechMap
2010 marked the year I felt out of love with Google. I mean… I still love Google, but I’m no longer in love with it. I’ve started seeing other companies.
Google has changed. It is impossible for a company as big as the big G to maintain a “do no evil” policy when evil is subjective. If you grow as much as Google grew then you are bound to rub people the wrong way even if other people think it’s the right way. And last year some things by Google I did not find 100% evil free.
But that is not why I’ve kicked them off the pedestal.
Google produced some serious product flops last year; maybe also as a natural consequence of growth. It’s not always easy to keep the highest standards. Sure, it had produced some crappy stuff before: Google X, Jaiku, Web Accelerator, etc. but these last few crashes were resounding and occurred in products that I believe were aligned with their strategy for the year.
As an obvious for instance Google Buzz. Seriously? That was your best attempt at kicking Twitter and FB in the groin? A poor looking, security fissured, opt in required crap-o-rama with some sharing capabilities?
Another not so obvious seriously bad thing is the Open Social Standard (although it has been around for quite a few years now). Not only Facebook’s single handed defeat of all other social networks put together is the reason this flopped. I fail to see how this might be called a standard when you need to write custom code for every single platform you want to deploy your app into.
But to me, the most resounding one was Google Wave. What happened there? The techiest of my tech friends and acquaintances all say it was by technology standards groundbreaking, a great idea. Tech and idea were cool, what went wrong?
Lesson #01: What’s good for the goose is not always good for synchronous stuff.
By goose I mean gmail and Google’s “You like it? Well you can’t have it!” brilliant marketing approach to beta testing and product distribution. I read my e-mail invite for wave a good three hours after the sender delivered it, got absolutely thrilled and entered the wave playground excited to collaborate with… no one. I was alone. My inviter then told me the same thing had happened to him. So, using an asynchronous invite method for synchronic collaboration might have not been the greatest idea.
Lesson #02: Less is more.
The Wave was a lot to take. It had to live up to the self imposed challenge of being the thing that would kill e-mail (really?) so I guess they packed it with everything they could short of a flame-thrower: it was an open source, real-time, expandable, extensible, embeddable, younameit-able set of collaboration tools including video, chat, drawing, infinite gadgets. When I finally got around to testing with a few buddies we played 5 minutes with something then moved on to the next thing. We did not get enough of a chance to let the WOW factor settle in.
Lesson #03: Don’t target nerds.
I get the feeling that at some level the wave was targeted to a nerdy public. Here’s a piece of news for you: Nerds don’t want to share. Gmail was something for everyone, in spite of nerdy Google tech lovers being the ones that absolutely had to have it, everyone else could gain what at that time was a groundbreaking approach to e-mail in size, organization, presentation, simplicity, you name it. If you target something solely for nerds, they will flock in and close the door behind them.
Lesson #04: Enterprise is not a bad word.
Google wave was clearly a great instrument for enterprise collaboration, and yet the idea of using it in the enterprise was not as apparent to me and most of the people I queried on this. Instead of pitching the “e-mail killer” maybe they should have pitched a “Google Docs on steroids”. We’ll never know.
El Shuje
On my next post I will replace all the a’s with smileys. Just for the heck of it. In the meantime… as always… comment, share, tweet, retweet, and mail me at shuje@holoom.com
