"We celebrate our failures", Google's CEO Schmidt said in the Techonomy conference, 2010 in response to closure of the Google Wave.
The times have gone when everything Google touched turned into gold.
Google has historically not been a company that has been afraid to take risks since the failures have been too far and few in between. However, in the last few years, a lot of products have not taken off as expected and have really impacted Google’s image among the consumers.
Maybe, now the time has come to reflect back on some of its failures.
Some of the recent big failures have been that of Google Videos, Google Audio Ads, Google Answers, Google Wave and its latest debacle, Buzz.
A lot of people agree that Google came late to the social networking party when facebook and twitter had essentially captured most of the market. However, I don’t think that this was the sole reason for the Buzz failure. The thing which drove people mad at buzz was that it was literally forced on them since Google bundled it with Gmail. It also had a lot of privacy issues like the status updates getting published in public, a user not being notified if someone started following him/her. People were shocked when Buzz appeared on their Gmail without notification. The consumer instantly rejected buzz and Google had to face a lot of flak for this.
While it all ties very well to Google's mission, the recent failures have given Schmidt something to think about.
With Bing constantly gaining market share, facebook and twitter being completely dominant in the social networking, increasing scrutiny from anti-trust and the ever increasing Wall Street expectations, time has come for Google to "reflect" back on its failures rather than "celebrate" them.
Food for thought: We discussed in class about Google trying to balance "exploration" with "exploitation". I think it is moving more and more towards the "exploration" end of the quadrant
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