What’s wrong with Google?
“The problem with Google is that Google thinks there is a problem with Google,” declares Allyson Hilliatd, senior technical analyst at Patterson-Forbes Partners. “The big kids at Google imagine their company is suffering an identity crisis, and they are having trouble making their company grow up.” In other words, Hilliard explains, as Google has tried to diversify its products and services, it has tried to become all things to all people, losing sight of its most powerful and distinctive qualities, especially losing sight of its own core business.
Although Google has continued to dominate all other search engines in the marketplace, and despite Google’s major incursion into the handheld market, Google shares have lost nearly 20% of their value over the last quarter. Google’s founders have lost billions. Hilliard attributes these losses to management’s self-conscious experiments with tools and gadgets that have little or nothing to do with its brand. “Google is the best search engine bar none. Android may be the best handheld operating system. The company needs only to protect its lead in those areas, and it will thrive,” Hilliard asserts. “Google can earn far more with far less.”
Google will discontinue “Wave.”
Google officials announced yesterday that they will discontinue “Google Wave,” inspiring most analysts to respond, “Did we even know there was a Google Wave?”
Wave was supposed to replace e-mail, which its developers claimed had grown “tired,” nearly obsolete. Wave developers designed and coded the program to combine all forms of electronic communication into one single “wave,” even allowing for users to post messages letter-by-letter as they typed. According to the company’s blog, the engineers were “jazzed” about their product’s power and potential, but average users felt more overwhelmed than excited. According to Hilliard, “Your average business guy uses Twitter for one purpose, Facebook for another, e-mail for more professional communications, and document sharing for ‘the big stuff’. Business guys match the tools to the functions. Wave was designed as a mash-up, and it ultimately served no purpose at all.”
Wave served a different purpose within Google’s corporate structure: Executives wanted the engineers to prove that radical innovation was still possible within a large corporation, that cutting edge technologies did not emerge just from techies’ Silicon Valley garages. Executives deliberately intended to create a group of designated risk-takers—computer scientists and engineers tasked specifically with thinking outside the box. “The risk-takers failed to recognize the difference between ‘outside the box’ and ‘out in the tall weeds’,” Hilliard concludes.
Google imitates “Bing.” Why?
In its recent earnings report, Microsoft officials politely credited the Bing team with steady growth for four straight quarters, discreetly skipping over the fact that the Bing “decision” engine barely has broken into double digits in market share. For the majority of web-searchers, Bing pops-up as an annoying afterthought, thoroughly unfamiliar and not especially useful. The Google guys nevertheless are flattering Bing with a steady stream of imitations, prompting Hilliard and other analysts to wonder “Why?!”
“The Bing knock-offs offer the most glaring case of Google’s identity difficulties,” alleges Hilliard. “Google’s advantage always derived from its intuitive design, its uncanny ability to mimic the user’s educated guessing about subject matter.” Bing, by way of radical contrast, was designed to function more logically and analytically. Hilliard stresses, “Google attempts to copy Bing’s logical arrangement, its categories and priorities, thus forfeiting its advantage. The most obvious examples appear in Google images, where the choices now appear in all kinds of categories and arrangements that, for most users, just complicate the search process.
“In the last few months, every time Google has innovated, it has shot itself in the foot.”
A growth-hungry company in a “mature” market
Hilliard wisely compares Google’s difficulties with the quick decline of the American auto industry. “Both have ‘matured’ their markets,” she explains. “Just about everyone who wants a Ford has a Ford. The same is true of Google. In order to sell more Fords, Ford must produce better Fords—not Jaguars, Volvos, or Mazdas. In order to sell more Googles, Google must persist in doing only what it does best. That is, Google must perfect its brnd by continuing to produce intuitive, user-friendly, super-fast and reliable software. That, and only that.”
