Google is so great they’re not
I’ll be the first to admit that I think Google is an extremely innovative company and they make some great products. Google is a great search engine, gmail has some great features, adwords is making them a ton of money, analytics is fantastic, etc. And if you’ve never heard of their 20 percent time rule you should, it’ll probably make you want to work for them.
But I have a major problem with Google. It’s their follow through. Google works on so many different projects that it seems like they only do a few of them well. They do make a ton of money with a small amount of their projects but they just can’t seem to focus on anything else.
Take Google’s latest project, Google Wave. There have been a few videos that try to explain Google Wave but even those admit they only show about 3.5% of what it can do. And the official Google video is reeeeeaaaallllyyyy looooooonnnnnnggggg. If you’re going to announce a new amazing product that you expect the public to use you can’t create a video that is an hour and 20 minutes long to explain it.
And getting a Google Wave invite is nearly impossible. Even the people that have access to Google Wave don’t know when the invites they’ve sent out will actually get to the people they’ve sent them to.
This is a common problem with Google. They have so much going on and so many great products that they just can’t seem to focus on the important ones and tell us why we should use them. I’m all for innovating but not when those innovations aren’t explained or when you don’t follow through on them. I mean, gmail was in beta for FIVE YEARS. Seriously Google? Five years?
Look at Google Books (which is also still in beta). They’ve already scanned over 7 million books. How many can we actually read? Nowhere near 7 million.
So Google, I know you are an enormous company but please, please, just learn to control your A.D.D. a little and focus.