Google a one trick pony?

BusinessWeek has an interesting article about Google "So Much Fanfare, So Few Hits". This follows the theme of my previous post "MacroMyopia and the Technology Hype Cycle". The article basically says there is way too much hype about anything Google announces, then goes into detail about actual market share numbers for things like GMail, GoogleTalk, and others. The bottom line? Google has no other products or services that have any significant market share.

Here is an excerpt from the BusinessWeek article. "An analysis of some two dozen new ventures launched over the past four years shows that Google has yet to establish a single market leader outside its core search business, where it continues to chew up Microsoft and Yahoo.

Consider just a few examples: Google Talk, an instant-messaging service launched last August, now ranks No. 10, garnering just 2% of the number of users for market leader MSN Messenger, according to comScore Media Metrix. Three-month-old Google Finance, heralded as a competitor to market leader Yahoo! Finance, has settled in as the 40th-most-visited finance site, according to data from Hitwise, a competitive intelligence firm. Gmail, the e-mail service that was lauded at its 2004 launch for offering 500 times as much storage space as some rivals (they quickly closed the gap), today is the system of choice for only about one-quarter the number of people who use MSN and Yahoo e-mail." "Take Orkut, Google's two-year-old social-networking site. Since making an initial splash, Orkut has seen limited changes and has faded in popularity everywhere except Brazil. Today it draws less than 1% as much U.S. traffic as MySpace".

There have been some successes, relatively speaking. GoogleMaps is second in market share to MapQuest. GoogleNews is also the second leading news service. In both cases however, the revenue contribution is minimal at this point.

However, it is important to remember the other side of MacroMyopia.  We under-estimate the long term impact of new developments. While the hype today is way over blown, long term some of these products could turn out to be big winners. It all depends on how much effort Google puts into making them better, and how much real value they deliver to users.

As I said in my earlier post; "The rational thing to do is follow the money. Don't be dazzled by the technology. Examine the business model to see if it makes sense and can scale up to a meaningful size business. Anticipate how competitors will react and adapt in the future. Then decide if this is really something that will change the game. Most times it will not, but there could be valuable lessons."

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Comments

[MIng Yeow]

Google is in a very interesting situation -- its cash cow allows it to invest like a playful father, letting his children do whatever they want without that much of a concern about whether they are contributing to the families bottom line. That said, its R&D is showing up rapidly, whereas Microsoft's R&D seems stuck in the labs. Lastly, Gmail has caught up very very fast, especially when you consider a very large number of users has 'legacy' email address used for their MSN accounts.

No offense to MSN Live, but Live Mail is still a bit too raw, and slow. Maybe the Outlook UI increases our expectations too much about how it is expected to behave, while Google's page load is considered pretty fast.