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A week ago Google launched Google Buzz. And Google's 175 million or so wordwide Gmail users (Comscore) suddenly had this new and noisy addition to their beloved inbox.
It's been a rough week since then. Both for the Google Buzz team, and those 175 million Gmail users.
Google continues to tweak the product almost daily to deal with the incredible backlash. That's not what this post is about.
Another thing this post isn't about: the fact that Google was forced to launch the product earlier than they wanted to and didn't have enough time to test the product properly. I'm sure when the dust settles they'll talk about the process and where it went wrong, and what they'll do to avoid a mess like that in the future. They messed up. They know they messed up. It'll pass (see, for example, every interface and policy change ever pushed by Facebook).
What this post is about is the powerful urge companies often have to shoehorn a new product into an old one. To ease the uphill battle all new products face with getting early traction. It seems so easy to just force feed existing users on the new product. But in every example I can think of, those users tend to vomit that new product right back up.
A week ago Google launched Google Buzz. And Google's 175 million or so wordwide Gmail users (Comscore) suddenly had this new and noisy addition to their beloved inbox.
It's been a rough week since then. Both for the Google Buzz team, and those 175 million Gmail users.
Google continues to tweak the product almost daily to deal with the incredible backlash. That's not what this post is about.
Another thing this post isn't about: the fact that Google was forced to launch the product earlier than they wanted to and didn't have enough time to test the product properly. I'm sure when the dust settles they'll talk about the process and where it went wrong, and what they'll do to avoid a mess like that in the future. They messed up. They know they messed up. It'll pass (see, for example, every interface and policy change ever pushed by Facebook).
What this post is about is the powerful urge companies often have to shoehorn a new product into an old one. To ease the uphill battle all new products face with getting early traction. It seems so easy to just force feed existing users on the new product. But in every example I can think of, those users tend to vomit that new product right back up.
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17 февраля 2010
