Comments on: TechTalk at Google tomorrow

By: ArC

ArC — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 12:25:26 +0000

Hey, the preview box for the comments led me astray—it formatted the two paragraph blockquote correctly, whereas the real comment ended up putting the second half of the quote outside the blockquote tags.

By: ArC

ArC — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 12:24:09 +0000

If you look at the areas in which Google got stomped (Orkut v. Friendster [...]), I think that some fairly clear patterns develop. Solving complex technical problems: excellent! Understanding what engineers/technical people/businesses want: pretty good!

I'm just an Orkut end user, but I would never say they did even the technical side of it well.

By: Colin

Colin — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 22:07:40 +0000

Yes to 6. As an occasionally-frustrated user of gmail, the thing should be much simpler—you get the sense of engineers figuring out solutions that appeal to them and deciding you should like them too.

Google Earth is great and fits what I think of google as doing well, which is bringing out structure that’s already in information and showing it to me.

By: Jake

Jake — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:57:29 +0000

Google won’t tell you if they’re making money on Google Maps, although to some extent it’s hard to tell, because there’s definitely a brand value to “Google is the place that has all the cool and useful shit on the internet” that will/may keep people coming back to their more profitable properties.

I use Yahoo Yellow Pages rather than Google Maps/Local because it works how I want. I type in yp.yahoo.com, then type “bearings” into the search box, and it remembers where I live and shows me the bearing houses nearby. Google Maps doesn’t, and I can’t be bothered to try to figure out how to make it do what I want.

If you look at the areas in which Google got stomped (Orkut v. Friendster, Hotmail/Yahoo! Mail v. GMail, YouTube v. Google Video) vs. the areas in which they do the stomping (Search, AdWords, AdSense), I think that some fairly clear patterns develop.

Solving complex technical problems: excellent! Understanding what engineers/technical people/businesses want: pretty good! Understanding what the average person wants, when it does not overlap with the previous category: not so good!

By: Michael E. Sullivan

Michael E. Sullivan — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:03:48 +0000

It’s not clear that domination of a market is required for a product to be successful. I’m pretty impressed that 39% of internet users use Google Maps sometimes or often given that Mapquest was around as the brand for a few years before google maps was launched. That’s a huge client base. In what other industry would going from 0% market recognition to 39% in just a couple years be considered a failure?

People want everything Google does to be as successful as search, when all that really matters is that it provides a significant user base with a solution and makes them money.

So are they making money on these things? Or not? That’s what matters to shareholders, and the quality of the offering and the ability to maintain it is what matters to users. I greatly prefer google maps to mapquest for many reasons. I’m intrigued that 33% tried it once and now don’tt use it, and would love to hear why not.

Michael

By: eszter

eszter — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 17:23:57 +0000

John, I suspect it’s partly inertia and partly that they offer a bunch of services that are relevant to users. Then there are the default portal pages that come automatic with certain ISPs, ones that users never change. My observations suggest that those continue to be used quite a bit in some groups.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:10:56 +0000

The fact that a generic portal like Yahoo can do so well indicates that inertia must play a big role.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 14:00:54 +0000

My point is that simply having automated data about your own users’ actions isn’t going to tell you that much about why others are not your users, and why users of some of your services aren’t embracing others of your products. Doing so is like estimating public opinion about a Republican political candidate by going to a Young Republicans meeting or estimating public opinion about global warming by observing an environmental meeting.

This is an incredibly important point, and it took the marketing industry nearly ten years to make it. Back in the days of CPM and click-tracking, there were loads and loads of people who really didn’t understand advertising but who had natty monitoring and data-mining programs which they proclaimed were going to allow them to target their advertising scientifically and make all of those girly “marketeers” obsolete. I am frightened to think how influential Dilbert cartoons were on the development of the e-commerce industry in the 1990s.

Ten years later, people are gradually learning that the old fashioned problems of branding, consumer identification and market research haven’t gone away, and we’re all creeping back to something that looks very like marketing textbooks circa 1965.

By: Matt Austern

Matt Austern — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 05:02:18 +0000

I’ll be there!