do we expect too much from google?

Thursday, 08. 14. 2008  –  Category: StuperSocial.com Posts


It’s starting to get to the point where Google is either underperforming, or we’re just expecting them to be invincible. Yesterday and the day before when Gmail went down for a couple hours, the Twitter streams were acting like it was the end of the world. Because, if Google can’t keep up, who can?

Expectations are obviously high for the company who devours small companies and makes them their own, usually favorably; but is Google spreading itself too thin? On their job website, they say “Google’s founders often state that the company is not serious about anything but search.” I know they’re talking about their foozeball-playing work environment, but it kind of says a lot about what their real focus is, doesn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Google fangirl all the way, but is anyone else concerned? Should Google be taken seriously when they’re gobbling up all of these media companies, or is it just a fun multi-billion dollar entity that we should be happy to play with?

While I’m talking about this, I feel like I should give credit to the other motherload of content, Yahoo! Yahoo! is still down with eating up web 2.0 companies, but they don’t conquer and destroy. How much has the functionality on Flickr or MyBlogLog really changed since Yahoo! took over? You need a new log-in which is admittedly annoying if you aren’t already a Yahoo member, but that’s pretty much the end of it.

On the other hand, Google took an amazing wiki platform—Jotspot—and literally destroyed it. I still have a Jotspot account which Google has left functional (for now), but anyone else who ever wanted a Jotspot account now has the option of using Google Sites instead. Jotspot was a great platform, I used it myself for an intranet at my company. Now if I wanted to move everyone over to Google Sites, I’d have to ask them all to sign up for Google and teach them how to use Google Docs, Google Calendar etc. It’s just not the same, and that’s my point: conquer and destroy.

Actually, I don’t love Google Sites, thankyouverymuch.

And Feedburner? Well they were doing pretty well until they decided to ditch the Feedburner Ad Network and roll out AdSense instead.

But back to expecting too much: let’s talk about the Google Knol for a second. Here’s a good example of us expecting too much from Google. They never said they were setting out to destroy Wikipedia, they even said that their pages wouldn’t get preferential treatment in Google search. But as an audience, we expected to see a “Wikipedia 10.0!” Not to say the Google Knol flopped, but we expected too much and thus were disappointed.

Another example is the iPhone version of Google Translate that they released on the 7th of August. In their blog, Allen Hutchison, software engineer at Google talked about how he was planning a trip when he noticed that Google Translate didn’t work well on the iPhone. So they developed an iPhone worthy counterpart that shows up if you point to the site on your iPhone. My first thought was about why the service doesn’t actually speak the translation. On a normal site for the iPhone, I’d just be happy that it existed and thatit’s a pretty cool feature for traveling and talking to cab drivers in foreign countries. But I mean, this is Google for pete’s sake!

With this mindset, we’ll eventually expect Google to start making flying cars, cleaning products and cola drinks. If Google spreads itself too thin, they can’t be great at everything. After all, they’re just a search company. Right?

So do we expect too much from Google, or just enough? You tell me.

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