I used to think Google had the best product team in the world. In some ways I thought they defined what modern product management is/was.
Now I have no clue what they are thinking with their product launches as of late. All of their products (and marketing) invoke this conservative, risk-adverse blandness that tries to appeal to everyone and in turn appeals to no one.
Edit: just to be clear. I'm not saying google doesnt have good products. I use and enjoy lots of them but for a long time it has seemed like even google isn't sure how all their products fit together. Perhaps that leads to weird forays into territories that don't fit which then results in shutting things down.
What's missing is the company-level portfolio management.
While I generally agree that Maps is a great and amazing product, I really feel that it is now suffering "peak product" syndrome like MS Word circa late 90s/early 00s. That is, I think Maps was probably "optimal" about 2 or 3 years ago, but since then there has been so much organizational pressure to do something new and add features than each successive version gets worse overall with feature bloat. Yes, some of those new features are useful, but overall I have less and less screen real estate taken up by the actual map and more and more taken up by shit I usually don't care about.
Same thing with Gmail - what was once zippy and performant-feeling now feels like swimming through molasses.
- Search (was once good, now just "marginally better than Bing")
- Reader (was good, the highest profile victim of Google Death Syndrome)
Uhhh...
Maps? Mail? Pixel 2 and 3? Fi? Sheets?
Sure, their Cloud doesn't sell as much as Amazon's, but it's been praised as being a much more coherent product.
Not sure how anyone could argue that Google hasn't gotten it right several times.
I agree with none of the others.
Search and Gmail transformed the web.
Google Docs and Sheets brought standalone office suite online.
App Engine was ahead of it's time for cloud based applications.
Google Big Query still is an amazing cloud based way to analyze TB/PB of data cheaply.
I'm critical of some of their business practices, but denying quality of Google's products is myopic.
And then they killed it for no reason.
I would phrase it as "other search engines are catching up to Google's capabilities", myself.
It isn't noticeable better than DuckDuckGo, which is a better alternative for privacy reasons.
They've also acquired Google Docs, YouTube, and Android which are arguably their most appealing current offerings. But those products are themselves giant question marks. YouTube and Android in particular seem plagued with privacy and ethical flaws.
Probably the most compelling product to come out of Google in a long time is the Chromebook. Given their history, a lot of people are rightfully suspicious of Google's intentions with the Chromebook and privacy aspects around it.
I tend to eye Google's offerings the same way I looked at MSFTs 15-20 years ago.
Ethical and privacy issues aside, they're also fucking riddled with UX nightmares.
That fundamentally distorts their incentive to develop and release improvements according to what the customer wants, because customer satisfaction or loyalty isn't the KPI, it's the growth rate of new customers.
Get them through the door by any means necessary and suck up all their data. If a customer leaves the service, who cares? Their data has already been profiled for better ad targeting.
They might have left Stadia, but they're still very much in the Google-verse of search, Youtube or Android.
YouTube also launched a subscription model, although I have no idea if the number of paying users is relevant
Same goes for Google Analytics and Tag Manager, which offers an incredible set of features for free, even though their is a paid Analytics 360 tier.
How many users would it take for Stadia to achieve that kind of critical mass? Gaming is not as sticky as email or collaborative document editing. So if the critical mass is not reached, I'd expect them to discontinue it.
Paying ISPs for internet access and on top of that paying for accessing a particular web app? It's too much IMO.
Gaming is big business, Google wants to own the consumer relationship so it can force publishers to advertise/sell through them.
Sometimes that results in products, but sometimes it results in multiple teams working on chat apps that never see the light of day, or Android being shipped with multiple SMS messaging applications at the same time, or that weird split between Gmail and Inbox. The money wasted must be tremendous.
They are quite poorly run. You have this huge monopoly product that is locked up super-voting shares. The people in possession of those shares appear to have no management ability or even interest (or just ability in the case of Larry Page). There is no oversight.
So it shouldn't be too surprising that the products they develop have no value...that isn't really what Google do. They make products for staff to manage, not for consumers to use. Maintaining products isn't fun for managers: they need to build empires, acquire staff, and grow budgets. Google is a bureaucracy attached to a monopoly (btw, this is totally unique...I am not aware of another company that has ever been like this outside of tech/the present...the East India Company maybe?).
I could be wrong, but this reminds me a lot of 2006 or so when smartphones existed but were mostly Blackberry / Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PCs. We were ripe for a technology revolution but didn't know it at the time.
Either that or we are progressively turning into grumpy old people who don't like new technology?
There is no such team as a "product team." There are programmer teams, sysadmin teams, business admin staff teams, adhoc project teams, and taskforces.
The moment the product ships, all go minding their own business till the next big assignment. This is an inescapable problem in big companies.