Is Google becoming the new Microsoft? Not in the evil sense, but in the lame me-too products that rely on brute force (their huge install base) and no innovation to hopelessly try to compete sense.
The difference is everyone still loves them. Microsoft was seen as ruthlessly destroying their competition. Google is seen as innovative. Bizarre.
Similarly, Maps was fundamentally innovative. If you went to GMaps c. 2005 and then went to MapQuest, there was absolutely no comparison. I kept wanting to drag the map around to see what was just offscreen. And then Maps kept innovating with satellite imagery, and Street View, and local business labels on the satellite imagery, and double-click-to-find-the-best-vantage-point.
Then there are a bunch of me-too products that succeed only because its Google and everyone already uses them.
Unfortunately this includes everything I've done at Google, but I'm hoping they've set things up for future innovation. Real innovation takes time, usually 3-4 years. Google's strength has been that they're willing to devote that time, but you can't have every single product out the door be a hit.
Regarding Maps, the fundamental operations had been in place since at least 2002 at e.g. http://www.nl.map24.com/. Actually I haven't been there for quite some time, and I think in 2002 their interface was actually better than now.
Google gives away a ton of free services that work. Microsoft sells people something that they have (almost) no option not to buy, and causes a near infinite stream of headaches to just about everyone (even if you don't use it yourself - how many times have you had to help out friends or relatives whose Windows installations got screwed up?).
Sure, giving stuff away may be a cheap ploy to earn goodwill, but I can truly say that Google's services have provided me with a lot of value. In the old days of Microsoft that was true for them, too, but over the past decade Microsoft products have done little more than cost me time and money.
Is it really that bizarre that I feel differently about the two companies?
Actually never... but anyway.
Sure, giving stuff away may be a cheap ploy to earn goodwill
But it's not a cheap ploy. It's a destroyer of value. Once Google moves into a market it's impossible to compete against them (same used to be true of Microsoft and still is in markets they're dominant in..)
My point is that as a community of people interested in startups/founders one would think Hacker News would be upset by this but everyone seems to celebrate when Google moves into a market and destroys it with free.
Is it really that bizarre that I feel differently about the two companies?
I think it's bizarre you think they're different.
it's not like we're gonna run out of problems to solve, because google is solving all of them for us.
If you say yes then I think you need to take a step back and consider the possibility that you've been brain washed.
If Google really starts cloning everything, the way Microsoft is trying, they'll start losing the focus on their core values. As a result, their products will be inferior ... their resources are limited after-all.
Don't believe me? They have a social network for quite some time ... see http://www.orkut.com ... do you see it competing against Facebook? They also have a Wikipedia competitor ... knol.google.com ... do you see it overtaking Wikipedia?
But I do remember what my online-life was like before Google Search / GMail / Google Maps ... I used AltaVista and the first page of results was always full of junk. I used Yahoo Mail that had a slow interface, and only something like ~ 50 MB of storage ... I still have that account (using it for YIM) and it's practically unusable (their spam filters are crap ... in contrast with 2 GMail accounts + 2 Google Apps accounts that are doing just fine).
Google Apps is also really valuable ... I can have my email setup for my domain in a couple of hours, for free, having all the goodies of GMail.
I'm also using Google Translate ... which is really kick-ass sometimes (I'm not a native English speaker, and my native language isn't really popular, but Google Translate knows about it ;))
I'm also using Google Docs and Google Calendar ... Docs because it's there (came with Google Apps) and Calendar because it is intuitive and it is sending me SMS messages for free, plus my wife can see my schedule without me having to give her my password :)
Android and Chrome are 2 products launched to increase competition. I'm a Firefox user, but Chrome is so fast and so stable that it leaves Firefox in the dust ... I'd use it, but some Firefox-specific features are missing. And Android is the open-source mobile-OS we needed ... polished, backed by a strong brand, with a good SDK, and online-store.
I don't really think it's debatable whether Google provides value or not ... they clearly do. And what's "innovation" anyway?
Of course you're not going to see revolutionary ideas. That's why patents are so absurd.
But if you're fear-mongering about freebies, it means you're not providing enough value to justify your sales.
Well, it takes more than simply dumping a free product on the market. It has to be comparably usable.
>do you see it competing against Facebook?
Facebook is also free.
>They also have a Wikipedia competitor ... knol.google.com ... do you see it overtaking Wikipedia?
Again. Two free products competing with each other.
>But I do remember what my online-life was like before Google Search / GMail / Google Maps
People and companies are not static. Yes, google did a lot of good things for us (as did MS and various other places before them). No, they wont continue to do so forever.
><snip a bunch of stuff about using google for most everything>
This seems to back up my point. You're using all these free things instead of buying something from an aspiring new start up.
>I don't really think it's debatable whether Google provides value or not ... they clearly do.
Perhaps, but it's not a zero sum game. Them providing valuable services for free means that I will have a much harder time making a start up to provide those things for even a small cost.
>But if you're fear-mongering about freebies, it means you're not providing enough value to justify your sales.
With google the threat is two fold: a huge company with vastly more resources than any start up will have who gives away most of their stuff for free.
It's taking the best of the Twitter ecosystem, Twitter, Friendfeed and putting it into Google's social graph. It's innovative with the combination of features they've chosen to employ, but it's not original, though. Search was never new when Google started either, remember.
-- edit: I am going to use Buzz to start blogging again. Instant viewer base, who I can identify.
I wouldn't call the 140 char limit an anti-feature either. Its become a key differentiation point, and is in many ways what makes Twitter Twitter.
It would be interesting to have a 140, 700, 5000, unlimited character filters in Buzz. If its display algorithm was used well, it could work out if long posts from a particular person were usually not worth reading to most people.
If that were enough to be "evil" then everything would be evil.
I don't care if Google is evil. They're a large corporation trying to make money like any other. They don't care about us.
* Nobody is claiming that Google is innovative in this example.*
My point was that the vast majority of Google's products are clones and yet they're still considered innovative where the same is true of Microsoft and they are not thought of that way.
What are you talking about?
I'm pretty sure Google didn't invent web based maps, e-mail and the web browser. Wave and AppEngine were good but useless...
Perhaps you attach some other meaning to "clone" than an exact genetic duplicate, indistinguishable from the original except for gestational differences?
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
See for yourself:
There was also the fact that they blackmailed PC vendors into not installing Netscape.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know of an example of a successful startup whose products are based on source code from Google?
But point taken; that it worked (or not) doesn't negate the fact it was done. Thanks!
I'm not sure I agree that there's lack of innovation at Google; I'm trying to think of a big company that does any better in that regard and can't think of any.
The iPod was not a me-too product. It was the first digital music player that took a more comprehensive approach to solving the problem around finding/getting music content from the "cloud" (back when "the cloud" was just simply called the interwebs) to your player. When the iPod first launched, many people did not initially look any deeper then the surface.
Perhaps once we look past the surface of Buzz, we'll see that it brings something to the table that has been missing in social status sites. Or, perhaps Buzz is Google's Zune.
- lower barrier to entry: many people don't consider they have enough interesting things to say to make it worth creating a twitter account. They would more easily buzz it, since it's there in their mail account.
IMHO, this is genius.
Compare how you would reply to an email notification from Facebook or Twitter: you'd have to login to the site and post your reply (or even see the actual reply) there. With Buzz, it's inline.
Migration of my friends to FB email seems far more likely to me than migration of all my social graph to Google Buzz.
It would also be trivial for FB to allow response to notifications via external email if they decide to do it.
I think people are seriously underestimating the value of Facebook's existing graphs. They've been shaped over a couple of years now to what most people want them to be. The vast majority are not going to leave that behind for a me-too service.
You can actually already do this by replying to the notification email!
For me, I use several of Google's products daily, and always have my Gmail open. That's why I like Buzz, because it seems like it fits me well.
What do you see happening to twitter then, if people move to FB mail, in addition to the introduction of Buzz?
A lot of this was elegantly* evolutionary, but it's nice to see them put a name and publicity push behind it.
*In the non-mathematical sense.
Also, Google's thing has literally always been to launch half baked ideas, get reaction, and then iterate. All the while never charging anyone except for the eyeballs.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1079765
AT&T To Launch Yelp Competitor - The telco's buzz.com site lets users' "favorite" local vendors and services.
I think Sun's revenues also came from Software and Services, but mostly servers. We all know what happen to Sun. I don't know where Google can find its next cash cow.
Microsoft's business strategy has always been a kind of unfocused. They didn't ever sit down and say DOS or BASIC or Word was going to be the cornerstone of their business, they just did what they thought would be useful at the time until they managed to hit on something. You can tell because, though I can't say anything for their old BASIC's, DOS wasn't even very good! As Microsoft got big enough to parallelize this strategy, it turned into a kind of shotgun strategy where they simultaneously tried to build web browsers and gaming consoles and mobile phone operating systems and MP3 players and webmail and everything else. If you read The Road Ahead, Bill Gates writes about Wang, which was enormously successful but missed the PC wave just long enough to go out of business. After Microsoft's own close call with the internet (ironically around the time The Road Ahead was written and first published), I'm sure these fears intensified to the point where Microsoft started jumping after every hot new thing, be it multitouch, MP3 players, search engines, or whatnot.
The contrast to this is Apple in the respective Jobs eras, which focused intensely on building a few great products. It's a far riskier strategy--if Apple invents the Macintosh and no one wants one, what then?
Google's had a shotgun approach as well--I don't know why, but it seems like a good use of the talent they seem so intent on recruiting. Part of the shotgun approach is that some products are better than others, but a likely bad part of the approach is that you are prone to go chasing after every new trend.
It seems like their "shot-gun" approach is to release a lot a half-baked crap just to generate some headlines and then hope people forget about it (e.g. Wave). I think this used to work when they were competing with Microsoft (which also released half-baked crap but for got called on it.. constantly). But now I think a lot of companies are releasing good products right out of the gate (e.g. Apple, Facebook) and this strategy is going to be less successful in the future.
Microsoft started off with an unpopular operating system, and forced it down users' throats by tying up with the hardware manufacturers. Users don't have much of a choice in the matter. I think they lost contact with their end users at some point. Today, they're stuck with the NIH syndrome, and keep running around in circles, without making an effort to understand the way the market/ competition has changed.
Google started off making good useful (and I'd say innovative) products like Google Search and GMail. They got their users to like them and focused heavily on keeping up with their customers' wants. They post pictures of their office, and talk about their "cool" work culture, and manage to get the public drooling all over. Microsoft didn't think any of this was important. At some point, Google will probably start becoming a sloppy uninteresting company that forces new products down their existing customers' throats. Still, a smarter successor.
Wave is probably ahead of its time, and also suffers from a poor user interface.