Last week Google announced that they were pulling one of their latest services off the Web. Google Lively was their first attempt to play in the virtual world space. The concept seemed to me to be a poor attempt to let users create their own rooms where they could hold virtual conversations with other avatars. It was nowhere near the expanse and depth of Second Life, and did not even sniff at some of the new features or concepts seen by competitors like Journeys.com. I was shocked when I first looked at it because I could have told you in about 30 seconds that it was a dud. So this leads me to the following set of thoughts…
Why would Google put out a service that clearly is a dog, when they are obviously staffed with a lot of really smart people? Either someone in management did not review this, or they just don’t bother trying to oversee all the new things coming out of Google Labs. Did they have any kind of plan for actually making it better? I guess not because it has only been public for a few months and is already being deep-sixed. Or, is it possible that they really are committed to using the public for R&D? Their model with Google Labs is clearly to let their really bright people come up with new ideas, put them into the wild, and then see how things stick. Is there anything wrong with this approach? Are they doing us a favor by developing lots of free applications and letting us try them out, and vote, with your loyalty to each one? Or are they just too lazy to really think these products through, build a market strategy and then execute flawlessly?
The reason this is worth writing about is that it takes what Microsoft does with their product strategies to the next level. Our friends in Redmond pre-announce products when they are nowhere near completing them, then put them on the market in unfinished states, and eventually get everything working on version 3. In this case, we are again guinea pigs, we just have to pay for the right. With Google, they let us use their experiments for free, and get input and a view into how well they might be able to leverage our eyeballs when we use the tools. In some ways, I like what Google does, because at least it is honest in it’s approach. What bothers me is the laziness part I mentioned. Now that Google is large, smart, and market leading, it seems to me they should take more responsibility to make sure that the services/experiments they “let us have” actually work, and are valuable. Absent this, they are wasting our time while trying to crowdsource their next valuable money maker. Further, all software companies, Microsoft included, need to be much better about getting product right before they are handed of to us civilians. I am not alone in getting tired of having to evaluate services that are not well thought out, don’t work, and are missing obvious features they would need to be valuable.
I thought Google was better than what they showed us with Lively. I guess I was wrong. I hope they do not choose quantity over quality, because if they do, they will soon enjoy all the warm feelings people have for Microsoft user products.