Building new products is difficult, even for Google
Google is discontinuing Stadia, the gaming platform that lives in the (Google) cloud. Every big company is doing gaming these days. Google didn't want to get left behind and miss out on the opportunity to create another revenue stream. However, it didn't work as hoped.
But this article is not about Stadia.
This is about how hard it is to innovate and launch new products. It is hard regardless of how big your company is. The only difference is that the bigger the company, the more expensive it becomes.
Google is a company with billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of employees. You would think that with this amount of power and resources, Google could produce nothing but success.
Here are the examples from the past which also didn’t work out:
- Google Answers (2002 - 2006): for a $3 fee you would get an email answer to your question written by a Google employee. You would pay someone to 'Google' on your behalf.
- Google Web Accelerator (2005 - 2008): there were times when the Internet was accessed over a (very) slow phone line. Google loaded the pages faster from its own servers. Since then everything has become faster, even if the Internet always feels slow.
- Google Lively (2008 - 2008): For a short period of time, Google introduced what we would today call a Metaverse. You could design virtual rooms and up to 20 avatars could mingle there. Facebook aka Meta should learn from history.
- Google Ride Finder (2005 - 2009): You could say that it was a pre-Uber idea. It worked in a few US cities and it was supposed to track taxis, limos and shuttles.
- YouTube Streams (2006 - 2010): Imagine watching a YouTube video and chatting in real time with others… in 2006.
- Google Image Swirl (2009 - 2011): It was built on Google image search by grouping together images with similar visual and semantic qualities.
- Google Desktop (2008 - 2011): Google search engine on your desktop. You could find all email, documents, images as fast as its Internet engine.
- Google Flu Vaccine Finder (2009 - 2012): Before COVID, there was the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and you could find out where to get the vaccine. What foresight!!
That’s just a taste. I found over 270 projects which Google started and eventually killed. But, many of these projects kept evolving and were eventually rolled into the products which you can currently use.
Google is working extremely hard to stay current and compete on many fronts. For that it has to keep trying and trying and trying to come up with new ideas, test them and either use them or discard them. Either way, there is always a lesson learned.
This should be a recurrent pattern for any company - you have to try and try and try new things. Without that you are done and there will be no recurrent pattern for you in the future.