11–20 of 36 posts
The risky part is driving people away from Google products and services via uncertainty. Is now the time to put all your eggs into the Google Voice basket? Buy a bunch of Chrome PCs? I understand why they have to do it but it will definitely cause some people to adopt more of a wait-and-see approach.
"Trimming a bloated ship" made me immediately think of layoffs. Then I read the article, and the tone was quite different, it looks like he's just re-focusing efforts and killing unpopular projects. IMO, "Me Too" products only make sense if you have the valid hope to be able to offer something better than the existing products. Gmail for example was vastly better than any existing popular browser based email client.…
Speaking personally as an avid Google+ user, I think that while it's fair to compare the two (Google+ and Facebook) I think they're approaching the same problem from two different angles. Google+ is becoming my source for meaningful posts, I see a lot more worthwhile content on Google+, whereas Facebook has become something I use a lot less because it's filled with the mundane comments of someone's day to day life. I…
In practice, for every Buzz that gets rightfully killed, we lose an invaluable resource like Code Search.
I guess it could be worse. I'll give thanks that Thomas Friedman didn't write it.
> “We don’t want to be left with a complicated array of good-but-not-great services.” Sounds like Steve got his point across.
As much as we all like Steve, I kinda doubt he was the only one with that insight.
> “We don’t want to be left with a complicated array of good-but-not-great services.” Sounds like Steve got his point across.
As much as we all like Steve, I kinda doubt he was the only one with that insight.
Page came to Jobs for advice on how to be a good chief executive officer, and while Jobs’ immediate reaction was to say “f-you” to Page, he remembered how HP co-founder Bill Hewlett advised him in his younger days.
“Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map,” reads the biography’s account of Jobs’ interaction with Page. Later Jobs came to Page with a sharp advising tone, warning Google was making products “that are adequate but not great. They’re turning you into Microsoft.”
In theory it's great since it should result in products that are more complete instead of the continuous stream of promising, but I got bored developing the tedious bits half-assery that has tended to come out of Google. In practice, for every Buzz that gets rightfully killed, we lose an invaluable resource like Code Search.
So far, the only thing they have succeeded in is search. Analytics is the best free analytics service out there that I know, with an interface like spaghetti. Adwords? Ugh... it's hideously banal to work with. Rant over.
The risky part is driving people away from Google products and services via uncertainty. Is now the time to put all your eggs into the Google Voice basket? Buy a bunch of Chrome PCs? I understand why they have to do it but it will definitely cause some people to adopt more of a wait-and-see approach.
You look at Google and for them the platform and developers are secondary. API's are not only an afterthought (such as in Google+) but they are something that other people use, not Google.
They kill services and API's because they don't need them and it doesn't effect them - but it does effect the users. I can still run SimCity or Test Drive on Windows 7, which makes me, as a user, confident that Microsoft will never throw me under the bus. This means that if you are an IT manager, you can make multi-million dollar purchasing decisions knowing that the technology will still be around and supported since Microsoft use it themselves.
Google could kill any API, and they have, and it doesn't impact themselves because they don't use these API's themselves, but they are asking developers to.
Google will never become the Microsoft of the web until they start using their own API's and until they start respecting their customers with long-term support.
I think he's right in many ways, Google definately doesn't work anything like Apple does, it'll just be interesting how Google comes out the "midlife crisis"