Google: A Series of Unfortunate Apps!

Ask any B-School student – “Name a company known for Innovation” and the immediate response would be “Google”! While Google has introduced some marvelous applications in this decade, the recent introductions have been quite ordinary.

One cannot say where it all started, but just everything fell through. Take Chrome for example. Google initially said that it never had the need or the intention to enter the browser market, but it did eventually come up with one because they needed a browser that would support all their online applications smoothly. Chrome is good, but to me it will always remain as a rip-off of Firefox. Chrome does load faster than Firefox, but it crashes much faster. Its auto-filling feature in the address bar is very premature where it gives the wrong suggestions when I need it the most! I will be surprised if Chrome’s growth in market share beats the speed of a sloth.

Then we were all swept by the “Wave”! Ah, didn’t you feel wonderful when you got a Wave invitation from your friend and you were all curious to know what it was all about? And then what happened? How long has it been since you logged into Wave? I would bet a few months! Wave is an app with which people don’t know what to do. Was it to chat or group chat or share items or to send more wave invites? Some people argued that it is much advanced to its time. I think it was a confused attempt by Google to bring social networking and conversations together (it had a separate inbox too!). I believe that Wave would have been fairly successful had it been a desktop app(I would have preferred it that way). I have 24 Waves remaining, does somebody need it? :P

And the “new” orkut. Nothing new about it except that it sucked more. I’m very close to committing suicide with my orkut account. It is that bad. A B-grade interface, copied-almost-everything-from- facebook, sluggish performance and much more cons only add to its decline. Most of my friends from orkut are now on facebook which has exploded into the Indian online networking. Google should just accept its defeat and close down this site. Turning around orkut to a successful product would be a miracle.

The latest buzz is the Buzz! It is simple which is what Google is excellent at. It is easy to use and connects seamlessly with other services such as twitter, picasaweb, blogger, gtalk status. And the best thing about this is that it is available with Gmail which increases its availability. Though it is a kind of rip-off(how many rip-offs lately!) from twitter, it does provide the features to like/unlike and then comment on it (facebook like). Google has to address the security issues with Buzz for it to come good.

Chrome OS is around the corner. A highly lightweight operating system that heavily depends on cloud computing. This is in line with Google’s mission of bringing every app online for free. Beta users have already testified that immense scope that Chrome OS holds. Online app providers would make a kill (and deservedly so). Let’s wait how it goes, but it would be a looooong time before it even overtakes Mac’s market share and the phenomenal success of Windows 7 doesn’t help either.

I’m personally a great fan of Google for they have introduced some groundbreaking products such as search, gmail, maps, reader and much more. But currently they are going through a rough patch as every successful company does and they are trying too hard to innovate. May be it’s time to take a step back and observe the market while you keep improving your existing products (just as Apple did - their last product release was in 2007 before iPad). Trying to force one self doesn’t work.