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Comment by Ardit20 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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