Three apples have fallen too far from the same tree that have produced us such miraculously wonderful search results. Yeah, I am talking about Google.The death of "Google Wave" was just the beginning.Then it is the death of "Google Buzz", which google has already announced and will soon vanish into the same cold oblivions to be greeted by "Google wave" and thinks like "Yahoo messenger". This shows us a trend. And the trend is that, people really have got demanding. You cannot feed them something which they are not comfortable using. Twitter on the other hand seems to hang on to its popularity also Google buzz also provided similar features.
Oh yeah if you are wondering what is the third apple that i mentioned above, well there are no prizes for guessing. Yes its Google+. Though the number of users on google+ are lot more...i dont see why anyone would do switch to google+. In fact, i find the circle a good concept, but the fact that + suddenly gets access to all my photo's irritates me. Infact, i am sure this is going to eat into Picassa's business too.
Yahoo for example tried to be inflexible and lost a lot of its audience. They gave us Yahoo beta which you could switch into but couldn't switch back. Something like the modern day chakravyuha. I hate the yahoo mail interface, its slow in loading, shows some really unnecessary ads and really is a bandwidth hog. We are in the age of broadband true, but still i dont like to give away precious bits and bytes for some garbage being sent on to my computer.
The biggest factor is that users want something new, something interesting and something that is not too complicated. There seems to be a perfect balance that needs to be struck by the developers in terms of ease of use, features and of-course privacy. You cannot force people to share data or make them learn new things.
For sometime when Facebook changed its interface i thought google had got the real chance to make hay when the sun shines. However, the fan following on FB is too big one to really get people off it.
Google i guess should concentrate on its core strengths, Email, Search, Maps etc and innovate there. Of course, Android is another story altogether. However, more importantly it should realize that competing and making products which are similar to what others have developed will just not work.
Dont try to defeat your competitor but rather try to win the game
:-)
