Given how huge Google is and the giant’s reputation in the online business world, it is no wonder that everything that Google chooses to launch as a new product never stays unnoticed and gets tons of coverage in the blogosphere and in traditional media.
The latest addition of Google Buzz is no exception, of course, as the blogosphere could not ignore Google trying to popularize the idea of lifestreaming to millions upon millions of users of Gmail, its wildly popular web-based email service. In fact, I think it will be no exaggeration to guess that for quite a number of web users around the world Gmail is the home page in their browsers, the first thing they see when they head online every day. And who will resist clicking that multi-color icon to check what the Buzz is?
Of course the launch of Google Buzz was accompanied by quite a number of criticizing voices about Google jeopardizing users’ privacy (as if it does not all the time by monitoring what we search for and what our email content is) and copying some of the worst FriendFeed features and for numerous other things that left geeks in the tech blogosphere unhappy.
But happy or not, I think we all should admit that Google will now do to lifestreaming what FriendFeed could never achieve - no matter how much we liked the cozy place to chat to our friends and promote each others’ posts over there. It is evident that the number of Gmail users is disproportionately higher than the number of people who ever heard of FriendFeed at all.
And now Google comes and introduces a FriendFeed of its own - a very simple new service that does not seem to need explanation as much as FriendFeed needed when it was first launched, at least because the geeks can help explaining and because the number of connected sites is so limited that you can’t really get lost even if you try to.
Now that I think about it, I can’t help but admire Google’s product policy: they saw something that seemed to be interesting to a number of people, they saw some potential in the idea and they used one of their flagship products, Gmail, to make it truly popular - and make some more millions off Adsense ads wisely integrated into Gmail interface years ago.
Ok, they don’t really want to invent and innovate these days. Instead, they simply follow the market trends and launch their own products to meet demands of their existing user base for these products instead of creating awareness and building new markets. After all, they probably innovated enough after they came up with the best search engine that ever existed, introduced the cleanest possible interface for email and made contextual advertising a hit. Now they definitely can afford following the market trends and launching their own iterations of promising things someone else invites.
Google Buzz is only one example and probably not the most prominent one because only a tiny portion of web users ever knew about FriendFeed - and an even smaller portion actually used the service. But come to think of it, Google’s product policy has not really been about dramatic innovations recently.
When they launched Gmail, internet users knew what email was and many had Yahoo Mail accounts - and the only thing that Google did was packing it all in a much cleaner interface and adding some small unusual features on the road. The growing popularity of their web-based office suite - Google Docs - is not really a wonder either: after all, everyone knows what text processors and spreadsheets are and it’s not really too much of a challenge to explain that it all can be used online via a browser and for free as an additional benefit as opposed to expensive Microsoft products. And was not it logical to launch a web browser of their own? After all, everyone knew what a browser was by the time and many people found the clean interface and speed of Chrome to be very appealing.
Android was their next huge release and again there was nothing revolutionary in it: everyone knows what cell phones and smart phones are and a number of companies develop operating systems for these devices - so Google simply came up with something that would be attractive to their target users, not really inventing but instead improving on others’ products.
Finally, they decided to launch a phone of their own - Nexus One - and again the same pattern: there’s no real need to explain to people what a touch-screen phone is, right? And it only took me 2 minutes to explain to my husband’s younger sister that his new phone actually was a Google phone even though she only heard about Google as a search engine until the moment she borrowed that shiny and new Nexus One to make a call.
The only exception from this policy that I can remember right now is Google Wave that is promised to revolutionize the way we use email - and pretty soon. Right at the moment of Google presenting Wave to bloggers I thought this idea was too complicated to be useful and later on I have never figured out exactly how Wave could improve my life. Google Wave is the service that I’ve received the most questions about from my less techy friends asking what they were supposed to use it for. And the worst part is that I myself could never find any worthy explanation for them. In fact, I have never even given all the invites I have out because I don’t have enough friends who I could explain why they might need it to at all.
But exceptions only confirm the general rules and for Google it looks like a general rule has become this one: follow the market trends, listen to demands, improve on existing ideas and make them work because of the huge user base Google has. After all, everyone needs a text processor, a web-based email, a browser and a phone. And why should not it all be powered by Google?
Source:
http://profy.com/2010/02/19/brilliant-google-product-policy-buzz-is-wise/
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