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by Marc Logemann.
Original Post: Is Google successfull besides searching? I doubt so.
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Google here, Google there, Google everywhere. But how strong is Google really? Given the fact that they could reinvent the wheel and the press would write about it, i think the success of their launched products in the last year is not very earthshaking.
Lets see, their latest tool is Writely and i cant think of something more ridiculous than developing a web based "word". Even with all that Ajax hype, you definitely cant provide the user experience one is used to. Even when they create a descent UI, you will still have timeouts and delays because its the web. People tolerate this while browsing, but definitely not while reformating the text or when running the correction tool. My bet is that this thing will be dead in max 2 years.
Then we have Google Talk. Its weird but there are only very few mags that write about what a bad success story this is. Companies like Yahoo or AOL are most likely laughing all day when they see the Google Talk marketshare.
Next is Google Mail. Without doubt one of the best Ajax powered UIs these days but from a sales standpoint (if you can speak in that way about Google products), at least in germany, they are no contender to the major web based mail sites like web.de or major players like Hotmail or Yahoo.
Google Earth is another product from the G-Guys. Its definitely nice to play with, but only one time, then its quite boring. I also cant see the real business case behind that. I think its a lot easier to make cash from sites like YouTube than with Google Earth.
Google Reader, a web based RSS reader is another one. To be fair, this one i like most because i am using it nearly daily but i dont know too many other people using it. Of course its not an indicator for something but i strongly believe most people use desktop RSS readers.
Google Analytics, a web site analysis tool is also very very neat. But it doesnt offer you too many things that other tools dont provide. But one cant say too much about it at this moment because Google closed registration for some time because of problems with the load i suspect.
Of course i dont provide real business data or subscriber numbers here because they are hard to get for their products. So its all questionable but i believe that with the marketing power of google (and all those free articles they get in magazines), their products must succeed more. They make tons of money in advertising but their plan to embrace other areas than searching for making profit in the midterm is not running too well. Their "we can use the web for everything" attitude wont succeed, i am sure. They could release every week an Ajax Framework, they wont sell people on web based text processing nor on anything else which has their home on the desktops.
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