Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
Okay, folks, let’s be honest – that was predictable. People all over the world are already using gDocs to access, edit and exchange documents (+ recently Google added support for any types of files), gReader to read RSS feed subscriptions, gVawe to work collaboratively, gTalk to chat instantly, gVoice to access a variety of phone services, Picassa Web Albums to share photographs, and many other applications (not talking about gMail and the search engine). Social network integrated into the most popular Google’s client, gMail, is absolutely understandable step to consolidate access to other Google’s applications. And whilst Facebook and Twitter owners get frightened, and some executives are even start bullshitting Google (famous Jobs’ speech), Google makes mistakes, learns the lessons, and slowly, step by step builds the biggest empire that has ever existed on the Internet. Google’s way of innovations (reinventing an existing) doesn’t require huge Oracle’s funds (Oracle’s approach of innovation by acquisition), but in many cases, Google’s proposal is objectively worse than the original: just consider Picassa vs Flickr, gTalk vs myriad of other better IMs, Go vs other concurrent languages, Guice vs Spring, and many other examples. And Buzz is not an exclusion – Facebook is more attractive, mature and comprehensive than Buzz. So is Buzz nothing more then just another epic fail of Google (like gVawe)? Don’t think so. Google understands that it will be impossible to attract as many clients as other successful networks have, or force 400 million Facebook users to change their favourite network for raw Google’s alternative.
What does Google need Buzz for?
1. Google wants to have more information (structured and unstructured) about their clients (more than 150 million gMail users). One of the gMail attractive features is an instant registration, where you actually need to provide a very small amount of personal data (which can be dummy). That’s good for users that want to access mail services as fast as possible, but certainly bad for the service provider. Social networks is another story – people sometimes underweight privacy there and say to much about themselves: age, occupation, interests, education, contacts, etc. Google wants to build a deeper insight into their clients, have a wider abilities for market segmentation, increase the value of the customers they currently have and generally manage relationships with the clients better. Secondly, feeds (chats, logs of collaborative work) is a source of unstructured data, that can be used for the same marketing purposes – Google will track opinions, trends and moods of the buzzers. And I’m not sure, Google will provide an open API for the third parties to access the data about their customers (like other social networking providers do). Google values privacy and uses customer records exclusively for own benefit.
2. “The only real failure is the failure to learn from failure” (M. Skarin). Google’s executives understand it perfectly. While media claims Wave to be the biggest Google’s fail of ‘09, the G acquires important experience in building of massive multi-user online collaboration tools. Though buzz might not be as interesting and comfortable as Twitter, it will definitely be more technically perfect – Twitter’s epic fail with ruby-to-scala migration is just impossible in case of Google. Google does not afraid to invest in new initiatives (even if they have merely a small chance to succeed), because they know that series of fails may turn into big success in future. And Google can definitely afford it, providing the hugest search engine and the most popular mail service. Google’s search engine is actually a key to promotion these days. Just think for a minute, what SEO means now? Right – pushing the resource forward on Google.
3. Brand-making and money. Google makes money on ads. The more time client spends in gMail/buzz, the more ads this client consumes. Secondly, one of the hottest market trends is a tendency of consumers to trust more in brands. And Google has a strong story to tell there – it has a reputation as the biggest and strongest provider of free, durable and robust SaaS.
You might not realize it yet, but Google has actually got a lot on the Internet under control. I’ve personally felt, when trojans were hitting my blog, and Google just blocked it in the search engine (which means, I’ve got invisible for e-society). Google can do it with any resource, whenever it wants (so be careful, Apple). Or, for instance, one day Google may decide to put the link to buzz first in the list for query for “best+social+network” (though it’s unlikely to happen).
But will Google manage to fight all it’s alienated opponents building it’s Internet empire? If you look at the history of humanity, you’ll see, that the most of empires willing to achieve world domination were ending the same way – elimination.
While you’re still thinking, I’m giving Buzz a try. Though it’s not going to replace vkonakte/facebook/studiVZ for me, it’s definitely worth spending time on, like all the other Google inventions. Be proactive and learn from Google’s experience – it’s still free for anyone.
