Google product blitz hits the fan

Sergey said he finds it confusing to even know what all they are doing. From Reuters:

"We don't want people to have to learn about 20 different products that work in 20 different ways," Brin said. "I was even getting lost."

Many of the betas are cool, but they do seem to fuck about with shit that does not really have benefit, all the time ignoring the thing that made them what they are.

Get those geeks off of beta projects and working out what spam is, that's what I would suggest!

"20 different products that work in 20 different ways" --more like 30.

The only salvation is that nobody gives a rat's derriere about 25 of them.

So, I use search, news, maps, and ~rarely~ local. What have I forgotten? What do you use?

Motivated by a strictly personal agenda, I would just like to point out that this is an unequivocal admission that it is possible mistakes can be made even by Google and that letting logic prevail makes good business sense.

masterplan at the rate they rolled stuff out. Growth at these rates inevitably means loss of focus & direction unless they keep finding more Sergey & Larry types with the company view. They are a victim of their own success & expectations at times.

What do you use?

Gmail, Google Calendar, Sitemaps.

Search

Adsense, and the spam board. I mean serps.

I love the spreadsheets and calendar.

Look.. guys if Google didn't try gmail (pretty successful) news (very successful) video (pretty successful) and a few other tries... they would still be limited to only search..

They did do a good job on several of their betas... and some of them are pretty useful...

I use Google Maps alot.. it's a way to generate revnue stream with companies paying to get their business promoted on that map for example.

News is tied up with lawsuits up the wazoo.. because of the content / copyright issue.

but overall they need to keep adding products within reason because some of them are hit and miss... and it hits less than misses.

But it only takes one hit.. to make up for hundreds of misses...

This reminds me of how easy it was in 1999 to get so carried away with WHAT YOU COULD DO with all of the swank new technology and forget about WHAT YOU SHOULD BE DOING to keep your shreholders, customers and employees happy. History has a way of repeating itself, no?

Someone point Sergey to http://labs.google.com/ Looks to be a tad more than 20 there.

I'm expecting os.google.com to come out one of these months.

Anyways, there are a lot of 'whatever' products they've produced but I am impressed with a few of them. Local/Maps is cool, Gmail :thumbsup, new Code Search looks interesting, and I plan on trying out Calendar soon...

The rest, I could live without.

One of the issues is the lack of a single point of access - while you may have a Google account, it isn't easy to see what services are attached to it. I've tried to gather a list of all the Google services in one place, but I'm sure the list is far from complete (sorry, its half in Italian).

https://www.google.com/accounts/
Or the "My Account" link on the top right of most Google properties.

How much easier could we make it?! :)

But it only takes one hit.. to make up for hundreds of misses...

Indeed.

Also, while I'm clearly biased, I'd suggest that even our services which have only a "few" hundred thousand users at the moment are (depending upon resource allocation, obviously) quite often still winners in the grand scheme of things.

Besides search, I use Google Earth and I am experimenting with Analytics.

Thanks for the tip!

Or the "My Account" link on the top right of most Google properties.

How much easier could we make it?! :)

Don't think it's migrated to AdSense yet. Need to send a manual edit request for changing email if you signed up before accounts was rolled out.

Not a criticism - staff are friendly and responsive - but accounts isn't settled yet and not so easy. :)

From last week's 'beautiful streamiled homepage' interview

Yup. Its way less confusing to drop them in the SERPs instead :)

Don't you see the pattern, even in these comments here.

"I use A,B,C from Google"
"I use X,Y,C from Google"
"I use A,Z,D from Google"

It is good to have a lot of products, everyone chooses what fits him and doesn't care about the rest. It's not about what sticks and what misses.

I think Google is right to try and expand it's product line, but first it should work on updating it's search engine. In addition to working on the quality of the regular search results, Google should be working on new ways to find what they are looking for on line as well as updating the features of it's regular search engine. Then, once they've got that down they can start to work on expanding their products or services.