The Last Word: Google too big for Google?

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It was quite a while back that Google bought off MeasureMap, and we all thought that all was going to be good in the area of blog statistics. Some even predicted that this might be the much needed Blogger dedicated statistics service, a la Wordpress. However, one and a half months later there is no sign of Measuremap opening to the public, or the statistic service in Blogger.

Google bought Writely a few weeks back. Its been out of service for new customers ever since. There are rival applications like ajaxWrite which are popping up, threatening to take away from Google's usershare and challenging it before it even gets started. Writely remains open to those who were quick enough to register ... for those not that fast, the wait will be long if Measuremap is any measure ... uhh... map.

While those happen, they continue launching new services like Finance and Page Creator (which closed itself to registrations by the end of its first day). Now, we all know that Google brings out every service in beta, and keeps working on it so that no-one can badmouth it and they have the rock solid excuse that its in beta. Look at GMail, been in beta for two years running now. But its just sometimes I wonder, that is Google actually foraging into too diverse a field, and while trying to everything, might fail to do anything perfectly?

We all have a very good idea of what they plan to do by 2015, and we can all see what they keep doing at present. But apart from GMail, Groups and Search, there isn't much that you hear people praise Google for. Its always Yahoo! this, Yahoo! that. Yes! Yahoo! is a bigger company than Google if the markets are any indicators. But we have to remember that Google is one of the top two influential companies today. They have the power to do what they do, and do it perfectly and have people follow in their footsteps. GMail singlehandedly ended Hotmail's monopoly. That was not an easy feat. However, Google is constantly trying to bite off more than it can chew might result in the perfect Sony effect. A household name for all the wrong reasons.

It should try and extend their current services, instead of going into new areas for the moment. There are many things people are looking forward to from them (including Measuremap and Page Creator). Not to mention a long due addition of services and features to our very own precious Blogger which will pull in many more users to switch from Wordpress. It'll be nice if Google betters current services left untouched for a while, and not focus on coming up with new things. Otherwise, they might be left with brilliant, but incomplete ideas, which are a waste of brilliance as well as efforts!

Don't bite off more than you can chew Google. One small step at a time!

[Update]: Designtechnica reviews some of the best webmail options today. GMail is right at the top! :)

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4 Comments

hey there aditya, you are going a little too crazy here, gmail forced a all around storage upgrade and a upgrading in e-mail handling but it did not took almost nothing of hotmail supremacy.

don´t let mediatic perception be your perception.don´t fall for that smoke and mirrors.

there are 200 million hotmail (last time they said) and something like a 100 million yahoo! accounts against something like 10 million gmail accounts or so, in that hinking is not a easy task to upgrade hotmail because of the inmense amounts of resources it takes, just the upgrade from 2mb (international) and 25 (usa) to 25 and 250mb respectively means almost a storage upgrade of millions upon millions of gigs, the same goes for yahoo!, is staggering. compared to that, gmail storage bandwith is NOTHING.

is not the same to stock 100 and 200 million accounts to 10-20(max) million accounts.

same thing with blogger, they are the big blog platform fish in the pond. upgrading blogger fixed features mean a consumption of huge amounts of resources.

people don´t see it , but the biggest reason why blogger did not get a fixed features pack upgrade was because they realeased blogger photo upload. i would have prefered the fixed feature pack upgrade but they decided otherwise. how so? well, just imagine the amount of resources blogger photo upload consumes? want a hint?, it consumes more bandwith and storage that flickr.

so there you go.

now, having that aside, i think you really should read about long tail models and the principle of such a model....that way you will find more much sense about why google works like it works..

it is even wired to the financial core of google.

-CRAFFTER

Anonymous, on Mon Mar 27, 12:06:00 PM

oh,and in that amount before you do some quick math, i am not counting paid e-mail accounts in hotmail (more than 5 million) and in yahoo (more than 2 million) that go for 2gb in each account.

Anonymous, on Mon Mar 27, 02:19:00 PM

"there are 200 million hotmail .... gmail storage bandwith is NOTHING."

thanks for clearing that out. the reason i think the switchover has been low because people have been unwilling to let go of the address that everyone is so familiar with, plus they have been using it for quite a while now. MSN mail live (or whatever kahuna is called now) is not going to make matters any easier to Google or Yahoo! i guess!

"people don´t see it , but the biggest reason ...... and storage that flickr."

as a matter of fact, i had seen that, and yes, I would have preferred the other features. but i think Google is trying to analyse the things non-power users find attractive, and are working to add those in Blogger so that they get a good userbase. not everyone uses tagging and categorising. not everyone wants statistics and other stuff. we actually form a minority of sorts out of the major blogging crowd. it would be good if Google actually tried to make Blogger the power platform, not a platform for the masses. it'll sit better with the users!

your comment was a post in itself! :P thanks!

Aditya, on Mon Mar 27, 06:37:00 PM

is called WLM (windows live mail)

as i said you must really study more about long tail models, check my last response to your new post.

and well. for a underpowered platform i find it very funny that blogger blogs swapped more blog awards than any other platform in the recent bloggies and such awards.

i must mention that blogger has right now 50 to 60% of the market share for blog platforms? considering that there are 9 other notable platforms?

and that even if is the platform for the masses it is a modder playground. the more hardcore you are the more powerful your blogger blog will be. way more powerful than any other platform blog...that is almost like poetic justice....

Anonymous, on Tue Mar 28, 05:27:00 AM

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