One column was called the Top 25 Search Engines. I essentially wrote a paragraph about all the search engines I could find, explaining their pros and cons, listing their URLs and making suggestions regarding why this or that was a favorite of mine. (Remember Inktomi?) What's remarkable to me is that even though this stable of search engines was a crowded one, Google didn't even exist yet.
What Google did was essentially very simple. They identified a weakness in the competition and exploited it. So many of those engines were getting bogged down with advertising, or were simply a bit slow loading. Google offered a clean, uncluttered appearance and an extremely fast delivery time. Before long they were the name of the game. You knew this because the name Google very quickly became a verb. "I think you should just Google that." Or, "I Googled 'chimpanzee' and got 19 million results in 0.75 seconds. Wow!"
Their success was such that they not only became the dominant player in search engines, they also built on this success with a whole batch of successful follow up products and services. Here are just a few: Chrome, Gmail, Blogger, Google Drive, Android, Google Maps, YouTube and Google Alerts. I myself prefer the Chrome browser, use Gmail, have been blogging nearly ten years on Blogger, am planning my next trip on Google Maps and am listening to Alison Krauss on YouTube as I write this. And I love those Alerts as an easy way to follow what interests you.
It comes as a surprise to many, however, that Google management doesn't always get it right. Their home runs have been massive and made the company a boat load of cabbage. But as the saying goes, even the best hitters in baseball strike out, and some strike out a lot.
Google Flops
Maybe that's one of the downsides of being the big gorilla. In baseball, the best hitters know how to wait for their pitch, especially in a big game. But companies can grow to a point where millions of dollars feels like chump change and they get careless. That is, they care less about swinging at bad pitches because it doesn't feel like there's anything at stake.
Remember when Duluth was competing to become a winner of the Google Fiber project. Well, looks like we got lucky. We didn't win. Here's the rest of the story.
And how many folks do you see in the Twin Ports wearing Google Glass? Here are a few other things Google was hoping would become important to us:
1. Google Answers. Not the right answer.
2. Google Wave. Didn't make the waves it was supposed to.
3. Google Audio Ads. Didn't add up.
4. Google Video Player. Sometimes it is easier to buy what you want than to create it.
5. Google Page Creator. It came. It went.
6. Google Buzz. Lasted about a year.
7. Google Notebook. Introduced in 2006. Was taken to the curb with some other junk during Google's "Second Spring Cleanup" five years later.
8. Google Glass. There are no doubt applications for it. Style wasn't one.
9. Google+ It's this one that triggered this blog post. I was listening to an audio book by one of the Google execs and he says in passing, in a throwaway aside, that Google+ was a flop. Interesting. What's interesting to me is that from the first time I was invited to do Google+ it was apparent that this was supposed to become Google's version of Facebook. I could see right off that this was never going to happen.
Oh well. You can't win 'em all. I'm grateful for those things they've done right. And I wish them the best going forward, in part simply for my selfish desire to keep Ennyman's Territory going for a while.
Thank you, Google. Keep on keepin' on. And if you ever need a second opinion on something important, you know where to find me. :-)
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