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Google Likes To Steal Others' Thunder

marksonland.com

32 pointstrs9012 comments

I think that a portion of this is due to Google's unusual hierarchy model. Between the 20% time projects and the large number of small, loosely related teams, they're constantly trying new strategies (whether internally or in the market).

When a related idea makes headlines, it makes sense to release both to make google look good ("We're one step ahead of you..."), and to draw traffic to otherwise unnoticed projects.

The reason we don't see this type of behavior in other market leaders is that they don't take Google's "Throw lots at the wall and see what sticks" approach (at least not to the same extreme).

Personally I think that taking an 'innovate constantly and let the market sort it out' approach is both a shrewd use of resources (as long as you let failures die early), and a good way to keep from getting too comfortable/over-adapted to one niche. (Although it's worth noting that not many Google projects likely make money without relying on Adsense).

Tech companies (startups included) are uniquely situated to take an 'evolutionary' approach to business because you can

1) Move fast (and cheaply)

2) Quickly identify failures (good metrics) and

3) Keep a fairly flat hierarchy/network, which enables efficient communication.

While I largely agree, there are downsides to launching so many "project" services. They end up with a lot of half-baked products under the Google brand.

The end result is that I'm wary of investing time in new Google services. As a business owner, its of the utmost importance to me that my vendors are in for the long haul, and outside of its core areas I don't feel that way about Google.

Google Talk is a great example: I would never switch my primary point of contact to a Google service because I don't trust them to maintain it.

Google Talk is based on XMPP, although their implementation of it is supposedly not up to par. I know I can use my gtalk account through pidgin's implementation of XMMP, though.

Gtalk isn't that bad - I know a lot more people who use that than, say, AIM or Yahoo. The client is better than iChat, at least.

What do you use for instant messaging? Time Warner is spinning off AOL. What if AOL finally goes under? Yahoo probably won't go under, but what if they need to make drastic cost cuts and decide to cut off the YIM service?

Probably better off running your own XMPP server and rolling your own client. I mean, you can never tell if any of these other chumps will stay around for the long haul! /s

I'm a fool, I meant Google Voice instead of Google Talk, the service they built out of GrandCentral. I don't trust Google to stay interested in the Voice product long enough to change my primary phone number.

Good idea about running our own XMPP server, thanks. If we start interacting with our clients more via chat that would definitely be the way to go.

FWIW, for instant messaging I primarily use Skype, although I have had an AIM account for 10+ years.

I at least know someone who worked (tangentially) on the statistics thing, and it was in the pipeline for a long time. Similarly for things like searchwiki or longer snippets (I've heard of small UI changes sitting around for years).

I think whats really happening is that when competitors do things its often a validation for the team that is doing it at Google. Further, I think some of this is kind of silly because this is Google we're talking about: the guys who sat on GrandCentral for well over a year in radio silence to... err... migrate it somewhere? Google development methodology is "do it once, do it right", and by God they're going to work on it until its right. This isn't some market analyst telling the engineer to turn up the "copy Cuil" knob or anything.

From the article: "Can you imagine Walmart making wholesale changes to its stores because mom and pop's store on the corner implemented some neat features for its customers?"

Yes, if Wal-Mart had the magical power to allow 1% of its visitors to walk through the door to a completely different store, they would have the power to experiment with a lot of things that would arguably make the shopping experience better.

I have no doubt the Google A/B tests a lot of this stuff before rolling it out.

Walmart does A/B tests too, they just make the changes to a single store to hit that same 1% of its visitors

They'd have to make the changes to 10 stores to hit 1%. Just nitpicking, though :)

My understanding is that major walk-in retailers like Wal-Mart do multivariate testing to maximize the conclusions they can draw from simultaneous experiments. Apparently an approach called 'taguchi split testing' is especially valuable for evaluating combinations of changes, and is also applied in online situations that go beyond simple A/B testing.

Google A/B-tests everything. Up to and including the shade of blue they use on their webpage.

I'd give them license to be total jerks about it if they'd just deliver the death blow to Office already.

WalMart does make large changes to their stores and business models based on what their smaller competition is doing. So does Microsoft. So does Google.

The bottom line is that they are all ruthless competitors and that's why they're all leaders in their space.

It's no coincidence that WalMart and Google have very similar corporate communications strategies, either. Smiley faces and cutesy icons all the way to the firing squad.

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