Google 2nd or 3rd Best at everything but search

Om Malik brings up here a thought we've been talking about a lot here at Riya. He references a traffic analysis here that shows very little traffic impact from their new products.

A new Google product launch seems to scare the entire web right now, but frankly they are becoming 2nd best or third best, etc at everything except their core - text search.

Let's look at the list:

Orkut didn't beat Myspace
Gmail is still has 10x fewer users than Yahoo (I got this from Yahoo guys)
Google Blogsearch is not as popular as Technorati (the technorati guys bragged this a while ago)
Google Finance is 39th more popular (Om's article quotes this)
Google Video is not as large as YouTube

If you think about innovation and new features the list of folks beating Google goes on

Blogger vs. Typepad
Google talk vs. Skype
Froogle vs. Shopping

Wasn't it Jack Welch who said if we are not 1 or 2 in a business we should get out of it. Every successful company is built, at first, on one breakaway product. Google's achievements around core search are impressive. However, the drive to keep the growth rate high and feed the Wall Street beast (and the employee beast if you read how $500MM of taxes paid to California were from stock sales) drives all companies to expand away from their core expertise. Most technology companies fail to diversify in the end. Even the mighty Microsoft really only diversified into a two product company - Windows and Office.

Comments

[Startups.in]

Jack Welch should instead have said "..if we CANNOT be #1 or 2.." or did he infact say so? Today you might not be in the top spot but you can definitely work towards it and need not give up unless you CANNOT and don't want to try.

Regards,
Nag @
Startups.in

[George Nimeh]

Hi,

Google said they never wanted to be a portal, and their traffic shows that despite the launch of many new products and services (everything from Finance to a Calendar) they are succeeding in not becoming one. Sometimes, it hurts to get what you wish for.

I also think that Google suffers from a serious case of the "Nimoy Syndrome."

Do you agree?
~G~

[George Nimeh]

Google's Nimoy Syndrom:
http://www.i-boy.com/weblog/2006/05/googles-nimoy-syndrome.html

[Venkatesh]

Munjal,
This is not an accurate assesment. MSN stats show 70% users go to MSN for hotmail. Does this mean MSN is not good at anything besides hotmail? We should also look at the number of users using each service. And also compare % of usage in each area. Google might have 20% of mail market , but as a percentage of its own traffic it might be 5%.

[Munjal Shah]

George I somewhat agree. To me the more interesting analysis is not the traffic between the new products and Google but the fact that we can identify clear competitors that have beat Google.

Venkatesh - I don't know about MSN / Hotmail. But if it is bigger than Yahoo then it only makes the point even more. Google despite its lead in search isn't a shoe-in for wining other businesses.

I think the Google guys are wise to focus on the "core" I just wonder what they will define as core and what they will do with the other products that are not 1 or 2. Will they kill them in Welch conglamorate style... or will they just keep them. I think their best strategy is to kill them otherwise the internal teams that work on the 2nd and 3rd rate products will prevent them to acquiring the #1 players like Technorati or YouTube. This is a common issue we've seen with technology companies in the past.

[Venu]

The statistics might be right, but they reflect the status of these products as of TODAY !
Most of the products have been introduced in recent days. Google Finance was introduced 2-3 months back. Gmail - 1Yr (Not sure). The point is they might be lagging but they have grown very fast compared to the competitors and might soon overtake them.

[chris]

I think it is pretty dificult to just simply look at Hitwises results and immediatly say Google can't do anything but search. As with all data it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

2 Key elements of this data. First, it is only relative to google not other players in the market. Second, the percentages are based on "hits" some services are hit active (like search) some hit passive (like calendar).

I look at the data and see one major thing Google's property martket share of allcategories is climbing as they increase the number of services they offer and integrate thier their core search ability into all the other service. Now there is a stat I would like to see which properties generate the most searches. I a curious because I use google desktop to search the web. I also use google calendar for generating a number of my web searches.