Last night I had the pleasure of being invited to use Google+. Long story short, it is everything you could want and more (almost). I think what's more amazing than the actual product is how Google as a company has progressed over the last 13 years. It's all about basic business psychology on the largest scale possible.
Think about the two most dominant products among people of ages 16-45 years old right now. I think we can agree that they are Facebook and the iPhone. Although some people say Twitter competes with Facebook, they aren't close to the same level right now. And as someone who has had an iPhone 3G since it came out, I can say that I haven't seen another phone that comes close to what an iPhone is.
Now, both of these top products reached their climax of attention around the same time. The iPhone and Facebook experienced widespread adoption between 2008-2010. This was when your parents and brothers and sisters started getting Facebooks and annoying you, remember? Although the original iPhone was not terribly successful, Apple did a great job of looking into the problems and came out with the 3G and 3Gs. When released, it took just three days for each of these phones to reach 1 million phones sold.
The first Google technology in a phone was released in August of 2008, about two months after the release of the 3G. Most people (including myself) just saw it as yet another venture by Google to spread its way into yet another industry and brushed it off. By 2010 Google had gotten the android software to the point where it could compete with some iPhone features, but not all of them. Google wasn't worried about all of them. They had a secret weapon.
As many of you know (and all of you need to know), Google released it's new Google+ program recently. It's like Google took EVERYTHING that was wrong or in the slightest bit irritable about Facebook and made it perfect. The following is my best estimate as to what Google's psychology was in the last two years.
Google saw two major players in two major markets (cell phones and social media). Google had already been a household name in the business of search engines, so it's a name that would be trusted. They most likely launched projects for cell phones and social media at the same time. They quickly developed and released cell phone technology, because we all know that if it's not good enough then we don't want it. They were able to make the Android software everything that it needed to be to compete in the cell phone industry. But there was one thing that it was missing...
Google+ was, I'm sure, being developed behind some curtain somewhere and secretly fixing all of the problems with Facebook. When they finally got it almost 100% completed, they release it to a portion of the public. Mainly to tech junkies and people like myself. This allows Google to get feedback from the people who know what they're talking about and not just frustrated Facebookers that had converted.
Now, here's the catch. The only cell phone that has the Google+ app (which downloads instantly, by the way) is the Android.
I'll let that sink in. Google has developed a cell phone that competes with the iPhone. Google has developed a social media site that is BETTER than Facebook. And the only way to access this site via cell phones (which, young people use their cell phones for web browsing and networking about 50% of the time) is to have the app or use the web application on your phone and view a mobile version. Obviously there are huge advantages to having the app over browsing on the mobile web.
Not to mention that at ANY time, Google could potentially not use the mobile web anymore. They could use the app for Google+ in the Android Market exclusively.
I will say, however, that the iPhone has one amazing thing going for it. The iPod. Nobody else has been able to match the iPod's success since it's conception. Oh, wait, I've heard rumors of Google Music, too.
This type of psychology is used in business all of the time. It's just amazing to see it done on such a huge scale. I mean, I knew that Google was doing big things, but I never in my wildest dreams saw a move of this magnitude coming.
Click follow to the right. Comment (and +1 for my fellow Google+ users) below.
BPL
No comments:
Post a Comment