Back in the mid-90s, a little-known dorm room project to organise the world’s information had just found its first office: someone’s empty garage. After working away in their University, now two of the biggest names in technology, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, had created a new way to search and had little knowledge about how their search engine, Google, was going to become one of the world’s most-known brands and a household name across countries.
Seen as the pioneers of the dot com era, leaving competitors such as Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves in their dust, the pair have created one of the biggest companies of the modern era. Going toe-to-toe with goliaths like Apple and Microsoft, they now have a myriad of products that include Maps, Drive, YouTube, and Wallet. But recently, something has been very off about their product releases and priorities.
Half-baked, go-to-market strategy.
I find it concerning that a company can create and kill off so many products that they have their own dedicated public graveyard, where you can go and reminisce about all of the things you used to be able to do. But that seems to be the development style of Google now, some are labelled as experiments and we never expect them to stick around (like Google Wave), or some are actual fully-fledged products that are engulfed in the massive corporation (I still miss you Aardvark!). Usually, I wouldn’t mind this rapid-fire release of cool projects, if there was a clear end goal of wrapping them into the main ecosystem but most of these things seem to just disappear without a trace (ahem, Google Now..?
It strikes me that Google has adopted a gung-ho release and see what sticks attitude, not concerned with creating a full-featured end product they are using their customers are guinea pigs and trying out new things in different markets. It would explain why for the majority of the last few years we’ve had a number of different messaging apps that all do the same thing or why some products get a completely different style or building blocks in a different country – Google Pay in India.
This is a bad method for any company.
Google, seemingly, gets away with this half-baked attitude of throwing products into the market because of its size. It has the market dominance and the money to throw behind its developers to create these random and sometimes useless applications and services. But if you’re a smaller entity and thinking of doing it, then I would pause before jumping fully into it. It can be damaging for those who aren’t as well known as the big G.
This type of product development damages the reputations of businesses, certainly, I am now less inclined to jump into a Google product immediately after release just in case they get bored of it within the first 12 months of release. I’ve been stung by this before – I purchased one of the first Google Wear devices that came to market before it seemingly became uncool to work on Wear products and services, not learning my first lesson, I purchased Chromecast Audio, the little-known audio-only cast device and now that’s been shelved.
Not only that, but it’s not sustainable. Not in a business sense, but in an environmental sense. Sure, in physical product development there will be some waste, especially if it’s an innovative type of product, but to then mass-produce and ditch the whole premise. Where do all of the unsold items go and what are consumers supposed to do with what have essentially become expensive paperweights?
What should you do instead?
It’s interesting that Big G doesn’t do this because it’s an option they actively have used and encourage others to use, but BETA testing new big features to see if they’re interesting to your users is a must. But make sure the new features are in the application you plan on using them with when they are released. Sending a secondary app into the market just causes confusion, as your customers are likely to mass migrate to something with the new features.
Test in more than a single market, take Google’s Google Wallet/G Pay apps – they were limited testing for a very long period and mostly focused around the US, with the newer version of Google Wallet being tested in India. Consumers’ behaviour changes between countries because cultures differ. So to fully understand the impact of a brand new feature or a complete overhaul of your current app, you need to be testing on varied markets.
And finally, always be clear on the intention. Sending out a brand new application with zero information and then removing them, again with zero information, is just poor customer communication.
Don’t be like Google, find your own way
A lot of people follow the likes of the big guys, even the big guys sometimes follow the big guys, but I’d be very picky choosing what methodologies you want to follow. The current trend of Google’s development and release plan, although is getting new products out into the market, is actually becoming really annoying and eroding consumer trust. They can do it because of their size, and well, when you want to search for something, what else are you going to do but Google it.
It’s important to remember that although innovation is good, random and thoughtless product and application development is bad. It sends the wrong message to your customers and doesn’t look good for your brand. There is always a better way.