Open House: Archives

As you might recall, there used to be a television show called "Lost" this series was, basically, Gilligan's Island with guns and time travel (and I mean that in the best way). In the first season, Jack (the surgeon with the mysterious tattoos) gives a speech about the value of teamwork:

"Every man for himself is not going to work. It's time to start organizing... if we can't live together, we're gonna die alone."

The ellipses cut out the part about him finding fresh water, but I left the gist of the quote because I can't help but think of it when I think of Google lately.

While it's true Google isn't on the verge of being consumed by a cloud of black smoke, it has had a string of what might be perceived as failures. Why? Is it a lack of overall strategy or the nature of trying many things in many directions all at once? Let's take a look at three products that didn't succeed for Google this year.

Google Wave opened up to much fanfare in 2009... well, "opened up" to a closed beta. Google Wave was to be like email on steroids: not just email, but chat and polls and embedded video and other elements, all put on a timeline so late-comers to a "wave" could re-create the contributions that each participant had made to that point.

I was an early adopter. I was granted relatively early access to the closed beta and I was given invitations... but even the friends that signed up generally logged in once and I never saw them again. There was no critical mass (not enough users that I knew using Google Wave to add value) and it was detached from the rest of the Google experience.

Right now? I can log into gmail.com and get to my mail (duh), chat, calendar, tasks, reader... the list goes on and on. It's pretty easy once you get used to it, but Google Wave was never a part of this experience.

Google Buzz, on the other hand, was. If Google Wave was the idiot savant that the Google family kept tucked in the hall closet, then Google Buzz was (or "is", I guess) the loud-mouth that shouted at you from an upstairs window as you walked by the Google Manor. (Did I stretch that metaphor enough for you?)

Google Buzz was placed prominently right below our inbox on Gmail. It automatically sent updates to our Gmail account. It automatically signed anyone with a Google account up, and it tried to bully its way into our consciousness. Which worked, insofar as people complained about Google's tactics and privacy concerns were voiced.

By the time it was toned down, no one cared. A story last week about a prominent social media contributor demonstrates the problem: while people might be talking on Google Buzz (i.e., pushing out information) very few people are listening and responding. That makes Google Buzz irrelevant.

The third failure is a bit different. Google Wave and Google Buzz were Web applications. They might be less successful than Google.com or Gmail.com, but they are essentially the same technological play. Google stepped up to actual hardware with its early 2010 release of its own smartphone.

The Nexus One is a great phone. I've had mine for over six months and I haven't regretted the purchase for a moment. I've also been able to stave off phone envy remarkably well, given the releases of the Evo 4G and the iPhone 4. The Nexus One is well-constructed and it gets new Android releases (including Froyo/Android 2.2) more quickly than other phones.

And yet Google has discontinued production and distribution of the phone... why? Because of the Incredible and the Evo 4G and a lot of other great Android-based phones that aren't even out yet. It makes sense, I guess, to not want to compete with partners that are doing a fine job in distributing Google's operating system, but didn't Google see this coming? Didn't they know before they sold the first Nexus One that these phones were on the horizon?

I can't imagine that they had a short-term bump in profits from the sale of the Nexus One, so I'm a bit confused about what the point of it was. I'm delighted that I have my phone, of course, but that doesn't alleviate my confusion.

Taken individually, these three failures aren't much of a much. Large companies have new lines that fail on a regular basis. Collectively, they appear to be evidence of Jack's "Live together, die alone" warning: the releases were not properly supported by other Google efforts.

Is that the answer? That Google doesn't know what it's doing? That Google is taking ideas from very smart, very creative people and bringing them to market to see what works? Throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks? Maybe.

But maybe not.

In economics, creative destruction is the idea that an economy evolves over time, and that businesses and industries fall by the wayside by superior ideas or efficiencies. It causes economic distress in the short term--especially for those employed in the obsolete industries--but is healthy in the long run.

Perhaps Google is enacting internal creative destruction. It is taking ideas and bringing them to market and being willing to fail in order to learn. It is testing Google Wave so it can integrate some of its features into Gmail, it released the Nexus One so it could dip its toe into selling hardware. It will build, perhaps, superior products on the ashes of the things that don't quite work out. These aren't the first products to be shut down, after all. In early 2009 Google shuttered Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Notebook and Google Video... and yet Google has barely missed a beat.

What does it all mean? It means that Google's failures are only real failures if they fail to learn from what didn't work, or if the public perception about Google's magic touch disappears. If the latter happens, Google's next-gen social media effort just may be met with a fate worse than any other: apathy.