Can Google Compete On Innovation?
News.com is running an articled titled “Google's antisocial downside” suggesting that the search giant appears missing in action from much of the innovation taking place around the marriage of services and social networks. I agree with assertion and believe that Google is showing signs of a company struggling to innovate at the rate that propelled them to superstardom just a few years ago.
As anyone visiting TechCrunch can attest, nearly every new, public-facing, services-based start-up has community based features baked in. In fact, it’s essentially a checkbox to be calling a Web 2.0 company along with AJAX and RSS. (Incidentally, my favorite Web 2.0 company with a strong social network continues to be Yelp.)
From when it was initially announced, I was cynical of Google’s foray into social networking with the Orkut service. It was hyped as a side project created by Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten and spread virally with the weight of Google behind it.
However, there were several blunders made by Google. One, it made a strategic error by not branding Orkut with the Google name within a few months after it was released. It’s a mistake to think that products, particularly services like the ones Google is trying to build out, can achieve escape velocity, that is mass-market success as a market leader, while remaining in perpetual beta. From the start, Orkut was functional, but also not terribly impressive to look at or engaging to use.
Many questions continue to confound me regarding the development of Orkut. Did Google ever really think that it was that original of a service? Friendster predated Orkut and had an arguably equal set of features. What was the business case for Orkut? Why was it never branded with the Google name? Why did Google release a service, even in beta, without ever intending to follow through and be the best in the world at it? How much user and market research had Google conducted prior to taking this public? Perhaps most importantly, how could Google not have anticipated the continued success of MySpace– something Google could have easily fended off by integrating an enhanced version of Orkut into popular existing services such as GMail using a Google brand?
Two, Google failed to enhance Orkut in the way that many users had come to expect from a Google service – which is sort of shocking given that it is known to be one of the most innovative companies in the world. My $.02: offering disruptive technology to the masses without first defining a significant business model is about the worst mistake a company can make. Did the great business minds at Google analyze the Orkut opportunity and decide to focus on other, “more lucrative” opportunities? For example, the launch of Yahoo Photos.
Yahoo, though not a leader is social networking, deserves credit for at least synchronizing the release of products with some form of marketing support and setting a clear expectation that it will continue to iterate its tools. When Yahoo announces a new service, it’s usually very obvious that engineering, marketing (and the extended business team), QA and support have partnered to release the product.
In my view, the mad scientist culture at Google is as self-destructive as it is innovative. Repeated mistakes by Google will send a perception to their customers and the next generation of entrepreneurs that they are no longer as cutting edge as they once were.
Now, MySpace accounts for 4.5 percent of all U.S. Internet domain name visits, according to the metrics company. In other words, the company has increased its market share by 4,300 percent in two years.
"MySpace continues its meteoric rise, to now claim the number one spot for all Internet visits in the U.S.," Bill Tancer, general manager of Global Research at Hitwise, said in a prepared statement. "We are still discovering the Internet laws of gravity as it relates to a site's potential to grow on the Internet. The fact that MySpace was virtually unknown by the mainstream Internet users two years ago and now claims the top position, demonstrates how hyper-competitive the Internet really is."
Source: TechWeb
