Let’s Celebrate Google’s Biggest Failures | Hacker News Reader

Let’s Celebrate Google’s Biggest Failures

searchengineland.com

59 pointsAndrewWarner22 comments

Wave, Jaiku, Dodgeball, Answers, Buzz... there is a common theme here. Google is a company run by engineers and their hiring process is designed to find people who can solve problems. It's been said before, but Google is great at panda tasks and horrible at lobster traps. [1]

The successful Google projects are ones that typically solve a serious technical challenge in an elegant way. Sure there were map sites and email services before Google Maps and Gmail, but Google redesigned them to work elegantly so you could save yourself time and effort compared to the other services. The same goes for web search, scholar search, product search, image search, web-based office apps, and application hosting services. Google didn't create these services, they just did them right.

However, building a site like Twitter or FourSquare, there's no real "problem" per se. It's more about community, and that's something that Google just doesn't do well because it's in direct contradiction to their entire mission statement.

Google is great at enabling people to accomplish things. They fail at allowing people to do nothing.

[1] http://ifindkarma.posterous.com/pandas-and-lobsters-why-goog...

Their problem I think is that they throw those products over the fence, generate some initial interest, and then they just forget about them ... as if they're good enough.

Those products weren't good enough, and yet they expect them to succeed without incremental improvements?

How hard was for them to do what Twitter did? Now of course it's too late.

Also ... one reason Google Video failed was because the approval for uploaded videos could have taken weeks, while on Youtube it was near instant. Youtube also has a consumer facing design ... they should realize that the guidelines working for their search engine cannot work for consumer-facing services popular amongst teenagers.

I think that is related to their engineering culture. "The product is done when the code is done" instead of "The code is the first step to making a product."

Technical founders should take note of that!

> Their problem I think I dont think they have problems here. Its normal thing that every startup does - trying all kinds of things. They are no different except they can afford(read: have money+courage+feelings) doing this on a HUGE scale. Its so huge that many of ordinal ppl fail to see the big picture and call a fail.

PS. Google recently purchased Slide for pennies. Nice move. Right on.

As a product manager, I'm not sure how I feel about doing SO much testing by throwing code out at people and seeing what sticks to the wall. If feels like a hammer problem ("All I've got at Google are a bunch of engineers, so if I need to see what the market wants, I'll throw engineers at it.").

However (also from the product management perspective), it is always impressive to see a company that effectively kills products. So many companies hold onto lagging products because they are afraid of the negative impacts of killing a product without ever doing the analysis of the negative impacts of keeping the product.

i was thinking about the same thing. killing project is extremely tough, although many underestimate this. So I am very impressed on how effectively google does this.

another thing here is money. google is a public company that has to make money. most of these companies they kinda lost (4sqr, twtr, you name it) yet have to prove they really have business model, by making say 1% of what google makes. and its never late for buyback as google is one of most active buyers in SV MA market

I find it interesting how the attitude is different when a web startup fails and Google fails.

I keep reading here how startups must try out as many different ideas as possible: try an idea, fail early, learn from your mistakes, move on to the next one. It's a normal process. Google, on the other hand, is not allowed to fail. A failed Google project is somehow a "problem".

Google is essentially a huge startup farm. Why is the attitude so different?

Wall Street, or more accurately, Google is a public company with shareholders demanding good results consistently. This is a very different game compared to a startup.

Google Notebook was actually a good product. I still don't understand why they decided to kill it.

Almost certainly it was a matter of traction. This is, after all, one of the main arguments for open source and owning your own code: You can run it as long as you want it, independently of market pressures.

There is a lot to learn; may be more for Google itself than anybody else.

I didn't like the post title, though. Celebrate others' failures?

The title is a reference by Google about how they "celebrate" their own failures by calling them out both publicly and internally. Not meant to be mean-spirited / schadenfreude-esque.

lively!

They're just as incompetent as everyone else then, not some sort of angel gods!

I suppose however that the article illustrates a very good approach. Trial and error. Some things will fail, some will work, you do not know until you try and a company so big like google can afford to try. As the article makes it clear there have been plenty - well I can only think of google maps and ok maybe Android whatever that is - successful products.

They really should however focus on their core business which is search and advertising.

> As the article makes it clear there have been plenty - well I can only think of google maps and ok maybe Android whatever that is - successful products

I already know a couple of companies with paid subscriptions to Google Apps, which IMHO is an awesome service.

If I were to keep only one or two services the Web has to offer me I would keep Google's Apps (+ Wikipedia).

I installed the free version on 3 domains I have ... on your own domain you get an email service with the awesome Gmail interface (many people take that for granted nowadays, not remembering how much Hotmail or Yahoo's Mail sucked and still suck). Before this I can't count the number of times the email provided by my ISP was down.

Calendar is also super-useful ... coupled with Gmail it can replace Microsoft Exchange in small to medium companies and doesn't have all the suck. I also use it for my personal affairs, and one feature I like besides the overall usability is that they even send free notifications by SMS messages (in Europe) for my appointments.

Google Docs is also cool ... it's like a wiki with which you can collaborate on docs / keep notes, but with an interface for normal people. Most of the time that's all you need, and it can also work with the Word format.

Coupled with App Engine ... you've got everything you need in one little package.

And for more than that, Google Apps even has a market-place ... http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/

I'm actually intrigued they couldn't create a competitor to Facebook when they've got all this infrastructure ... they definitely shouldn't give up on Buzz and just improve it incrementally.

What would happen if they closed any of those projects tomorrow? How would one recover the data or justify the time investment? Things like search and maps are awesome, but their strength is that they are passively used. I'd hate to see them disappear, but it wouldn't harm me if they did, and something else would eventually fill the void. Trusting Google with data or relying on their APIs is another thing entirely. Maybe they should focus on the area of passively consumed information, which they've proven they excel at.

Google docs you can regularly backup to a shared drive, translating tags to folders.

Gmail you can back up over IMAP.

Maps and search, yeah, we're dependent, but those are ongoing projects. Neither as they exist today will be much use in the future. (Much more so for search.)

The core of IBM's business in the late 1970s was mainframes for large businesses. Should they have stayed focused on that, and not on the consumer PC market, or services today?

Their core market today is still mainframes for large businesses.

Their original business was typewriters and tabulating equipment. They should have stuck with that :)

The typewriter business was an acquisition! (Electromatic was the name of the previously independent typewriter company.) Time clocks and scales were the other original lines besides tabulating.

No, I'd say the average is far less competent than Google. Microsoft, for example, or Sun. That said, Google has flaws and certainly lacks the success rate and truly otherworldly batting average of a company like Apple.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com