I am beginning to change my mind on Google as both a sound investment and a viable, sustainable corporation.

This is a company with one competitive advantage, their search engine technology, that they have parlayed into a massive explosion of services. The thing is, what other services do they provide that are either a) essential or b) differentiated within their respective markets?

They are beginning to remind me of the 35-year-old guy with umpteen graduate degrees but no real-world experience. Pick a direction...take one of these ideas you've got to the next level already. Stop creating more breadth, and add some depth to what you're doing!

For example, I had been wanting to see Kobe Bryant's 81-point extravaganza for a week or so now, and I knew Google had it on there. So I go to Google Video to download it, and discover that Google's video site is one of the most unorganized, thrown-together hack jobs anywhere. (Go take a look at it for yourself.) Anyone who has dealt with iTunes knows what a good media store interface looks like. Google ought to go check that out for themselves, actually. The clunky site made me register before I had the luxury of downloading a grainy video that actually didn't really "download" at all ... it still makes me stream parts of it and actually be online to watch it. And, of course, trying to put it on my video iPod didn't work at all.

Who knows what videos are actually on the site...the ability to navigate around Google's video site effectively is basically nonexistent. Oh, but they do have MacGyver episodes...

So now we're back to the 35-year-old grad student metaphor, except now we also find that this guy can't dress himself. The sense of aesthetics on Google are a complete lost cause.

Technology companies should understand this by now: aesthetics are everything. Look at the evolution of the GUI and the history of Windows, for example. Or look at the success of the iPod over similar, if not technically superior, rivals in that marketplace.

The place where they REALLY didn't get the whole aesthetics thing is in their handling of their stock price, where the decision to not split the stock as it appreciated up into the $300+ realm for the first time was terribly misguided. Even tech companies can be victims of just plain bad advice.

And hey, I still like the company. I like their strategy of hiring smart folks, as hiring PhDs has never been cheaper. But they aren't adequately capitalizing on the big, bright ideas their labor force is providing them.

Their push for an advertising-subsidized, entirely online suite of productivity software sounds like a trainwreck waiting to happen. Their questioning of "why should I ever carry my most important documents around under my arm" shows a complete misunderstanding of why laptop computers evolved from desktops in the first place: security. Yeah, maybe your laptop can get stolen or something, but its a hell of a lot better than the document being permanently online.

Microsoft is one example of a company that broadens its horizons, and then immediately moves to dominate the field. What they've done with their XBox brand in such a short amount of time is pretty spectacular, and its clear they understand what it will take in an incredibly competitive market to continue to succeed.

But if there's one company out there that's squandering an opportunity perhaps even to a more tragic extent than Google, its the folks at Wikipedia. The concept of a free encyclopedia that is open to editing by any member of the general populace never was meant to be sustainable. Marketing is too important of a corporate weapon to be defanged by some silly website, and instead of working with major corporate entities to give them increased control over their own Wikipedia entries, they have steadfastly maintained a philosophy of neutrality. Which, of course, should give them comfort long after they've been violently shoved out of business by some corporation that has just had it with dealing with them.

A final lesson to be gleaned from some of these tech companies is that there most definitely is such thing as a bad customer. Apple has been a long sufferer of the "bad customer," with their ridiculous ideologues preaching the gospel of Apple, iMac, and all things not called PC on every street corner for decades now. Google and Wikipedia both suffer from this problem, to a lesser but still significant extent. No one wants to hear overly aggressive nerds spew forth some diatribe about why everyone should use X service or Y website. Indeed, this is one of the best ways to speed up public backlash for a successful internet venture.

Part of this problem is inherent in the use of technology: companies with a niche (Wikipedia) or a dominating technology (Google) will draw these tech-savvy consumers. The key is adopting the appropriate brand image that constantly works to draw in the more normal members of the population as well. (An image we conscientiously employ with the iTest, as you may have noticed from previous blog entries on the topic.)

So sayonara, Google. By the time I turn 30, you'll be gone*. Wikipedia, you practically never even existed, that's how gone you are right now.



* "gone" = acquired and gutted. The brand may remain, as a highly-specific reference to either innovation in R&D efforts or search engine superiority, but the company won't. WRITE IT DOWN!