Google's Epic Battle: Searching for the New Philosophy

Years when companies had clear specializations and didn't try to produce virtually everything at the same time are long gone. And in the tech field that never happened at all, actually. Today the competition becomes even more intensive as traditional hardware companies begin to create software, old companies fall apart and new corporations are being created in college dormitories.

After Facebook success, there were many attempts to knock it off the throne, but no one succeeded. There can be different explanations to this fact, and nobody can determine which one is right. Facebook has a lot of problems connected with functions and usability, yet it's still the most popular social network on the planet.

While tech industry is more familiar with the scenario when brand new companies destroy the old ones, the situation when a giant corporation breaks into new segment and outperforms all its rivals is not completely uncommon (remember the situation with iPod in 2001, for example). And Google was viewed as a potential competitor to Facebook almost from the beginning, despite of Google's indifference for social networking segment at first, and unsuccessful efforts to break into the field (Orkut experience).

Then in June 2011 Google+ was launched. Google has a lot of supporters all around the world (including me) and many of them were happy with the start of this project. But after a few weeks, major flaws came to light, such as poor functionality and controversial design solutions, and people began to return to Facebook and other networks, only occasionally visiting Google+. Maybe the biggest problem of Google project was lack of truly innovative functions. Their search engine years ago led to the revolution in information processing, and now Google+ looked just like a polished version of current social networking projects, with only a few relatively new ideas and limited functionality.

On April 4, 2011 Eric Schmidt resigned as CEO and was replaced with Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google. One year on, it's time to take a look on the situation in company. There is a big article on this topic in Businessweek: The Education of Google's Larry Page, if you are interested.


And here are some of my thoughts.

When Google was started, the impressive technology developed by its founders helped it to conquer the world pretty easily. Nobody on the planet had anything of that kind embodied into a real business solution. Well, that may be not entirely true; for example, russian search engine Yandex had somehow similar developments in the area, and there definitely were others too. But it is more important that Altavista and other major players on the search engine market didn't have such technologies and didn't want to endeavor to create it. Now Google is the major search engine in the world, while Altavista is almost forgotten.

After this success, Google expanded rapidly. It was positioned to be a company with unique culture, great products and the emphasis to create things to make customers happy in the first place. And for some time, everything was great. Many remember the incredibly successful launch of Gmail services, for example. There were also examples of valuable acqusitions such as Youtube and Blogger.

But with the rise of mobile devices and social networks, Google positions began to look not so firm. While Facebook was attracting millions of new users, and Apple's iPhone was approaching to the title of the most successful smartphone of all times, Google created unsuccessful and controvesial Wave, Buzz and Orkut. The situation has improved with the start of Android platform, but the beginning of the patent war with Apple and other major players has brought new problems.

In such circumstances, the start of Google+ could be viewed as a great move. And partially it was. Google executives state that the network is successful and the work on it is in full swing. Of course, there is a chance that the situation looks much better from the inside, but the 3.3 minutes the average user spends on Google+ compared to 7.5 hours spent on Facebook seem really disappointing. Besides, the intergration between social network and search engine incurred displeasure of many users and draw attention of the Federal Trade Commission.

And it's only a short list of problems and changellenges. Some of them are just usual problems that accompany every large company at some stages. Others have deeper roots connected with the entire culture of project development Google was always praised for. Today creating successful and finished products may be more important than saving its reputation as the world's center for creative research. And it won't turn Google in some kind of the evil corporation. It'll just make it more effective. Fortunately, it seems that Larry Page understands that.

To sum it up, while Google is still one of the best companies, it should evolve to meet the challenges of the changing world and keep its special place in the industry. Good luck!