Played Out Pi Gags

I want to briefly (very briefly) touch on the Nortel patent bidding just over a week ago. There was a lot of media coverage and some of it focused on how Google was making bizarre bids that were mathematical numbers like pi. The general perception became that Google wasn’t really taking it that seriously.

This is wrong.

Not only were they taking it seriously but they were taking it very seriously. A well-placed source present during the entire bidding process informed me that bidding got pretty intense among all the parties, including Google. In fact, when bids got as high as the $4 billion mark, Google employees had to take a break in order to go back and clear new, higher bids with Larry Page.

My point is that Google didn’t just take this lying down. They knew exactly how much they wanted to spend and how much they were willing to go over that amount to get what they wanted. And they lost.

In the midst of all the free and great services that Google provides, it’s easy to look at them like a snarky little startup that just happens to be more successful than most. They’re not. They are a large business and they’re very good at being one. Are they going to get slammed by litigation now? Of course. Those Nortel patents were valuable. But just like Apple, Microsoft, Intel, and a whole host of others, Google knows what it’s doing. Most successful businesses do.

Except RIM.

App Ecosystems

We’ll start with a question: How many posts a year do you see about app store A with X apps and Y downloads? I reckon it’ll be 50+ total. The problem with this is that none of those posts give a metric that shows the real health of the application ecosystem for those devices. If there were some way to see an app store’s quality pickings in comparison to it’s bloat items, we could rank the markets properly.

To qualify as a quality app, we’d have to have an average rating higher than 4.5 and at least 100 reviews to make sure it isn’t horribly skewed by outliers. You could take that number alone and rank the application markets, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Over saturation of a market also plays a part in how desirable a market is. Measure over saturation as the percentage of all apps on that store that aren’t deemed quality apps.

When it’s not hard to come up those extra quality identifiers of an app store, why don’t the journalists work on analyzing app stores how they really should be? Quality over Quantity, as the saying goes.

The “Google Experience”

As Stich so succinctly put it, “I can’t believe it.“ 

Though I differ as to what I can’t believe. The big two surprising things throughout all of this are Google’s sudden “firing on all cylinders” approach and their Apple-esque marketing. 

Google usually takes baby steps with their products. Their first miserable and failed attempt at the social space, Buzz, was a big baby step, but a baby step nonetheless. It was incorporated into Gmail for all users. Annoying, but to many, barely noticeable. The Google+ approach is different. That’s because it’s not a social approach at all. It’s a Google approach, an approach to the entirety of Google.

While testing out their Google+ product on a what seems to be a pretty massive scale, Google is simultaneously overhauling their entire interface and experience. They’re in the midst of putting all of the content that everyone uses in one extremely convenient place. And everyone is already used to (and using) the toolbar. Google just made a couple of changes to it. When G+ hits prime time, everyone will already be ready and trained for the interface.

Facebook can only dream of this.

Meanwhile, Google is up on the advertising front with the videos it put out. They were like the best Apple can put out. I get annoyed with catchy hipster tunes and contrived “family” moments in Apple ads as much as the next guy but they’re nothing if not effective. They’re what people want out of their devices and software: an easy way to connect with family & friends, fast access to their music and videos, etc. This is exactly what Google did. And they managed to do it with none of the pretense.

Google is engaging in a whole new ball game here and they’re doing it with style. They want the web to be a “Google experience” and for the first time, it looks like they might be ready to do it.

A Gorgeous Google?

I can’t believe it.

Over the past week, with the introduction of Google+ (Google’s first product that could be a serious competitor in the social space,) the big G has rolled out updates to their stylings on many pages. With a new (preview) theme for gMail, a new Calendar theme, a Picasa skin update and the launch of the Google+ bar, does this signal a fundamental shift in how Google sees their products?

For seemingly the first time ever, Google is putting the user experience on the same level as the product function. There’s two possibilities I see for why this is the case:

  1. Google deems some of these projects ‘feature complete’ and thinks they should focus on making them more consumer friendly.
  2. Google now, because of the UX successes that Apple has had, feels the need to improve their own UX in hopes to bring a complete, user-focused ecosystem to market.

The first is the one that really means something.  This is good and troubling at the same time. Google will possibly stop working on these products but shift these quality engineers to other products like G+ and Offers (not to mention all the other features coming to G+.) If they really do tone down development of products like Calendar, Reader and Picasa, I hope to see a lot of innovation with G+.

On the second: This is great for Google all users. It means that you get better products because of market competition. Awesome.