When I first met Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in the 20th century, my first impressions about them included phrases like super-smart, engineer's engineers, and minimalists. They argued against the clutter that was AltaVista (for you youngsters it was a great search engine before Google) and wanted their creation—Google—to be the exact opposite and focus on finding things on the Web really, really quickly:
" 'Today's portals are not really about search, but instead they are all about page views and other services,' says Page. 'We are all about search and pure search, while the other guys think of themselves as media companies, not as search engines anymore,' quips Brin." (from my story for Forbes.com)
They knew search queries were nothing without a super infrastructure to support those queries. But more important, they knew simplicity of that experience would endear them to the masses. Google came up with a clean white page that featured nothing but the Google logo, one small box for entering your queries and the search button. That was a perfect solution, and I bet Apple's Steve Jobs would have a tough time finding fault with it. One look at the page and you knew exactly what to do next.
Now for the first 10 or so years of Google's life, that simple search-box-driven philosophy worked well for the Mountain View (Calif.)-based Internet giant. It also found a way to augment that simplicity with a text-ads-based business model, which has turned the company into a nearly $30 billion-a-year behemoth.
As it looks at its future, Google needs to realize it has a "user experience" problem and its simplicity—the elegant search box—isn't enough, especially as it starts to compete with rivals whose entire existence revolves around easy, consumer experiences. To me, user experience isn't about making things pretty and using pretty icons. Instead it's about making simple, beautiful, usable, and user-friendly interfaces.
No one can argue with Google's ability to engineer great software—it's done so in the past—but that simply isn't good enough in the new worlds it is trying to conquer. Televisions, phones, productivity applications, and even Google's own local pages are less about search and more about engagement: something not core to the company's corporate DNA. Here are three major challenges Google needs to surmount:
• Make software usable by tens of millions of people on a disparate array of products.
• Overcome its history of only using data to define its future.
• Figure out how to keep people in its playground, rather than helping people find the information they were looking for and sending them elsewhere: a radical new approach to business.
Those problems are behind the issues the company is facing with some of its products. On Dec. 20, The New York Times reported Google was postponing the release of Google TV software, which in turn would delay its partners' plans to show connected televisions at the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 (CES).Google TV software has come under criticism for being too complex.
Such challenges aren't unique to Google TV, though they might be most acute because of its newness. For the past few days, I've been using a Nexus S, a smartphone made by Samsung on behalf of Google using Android OS—which is arguably an OS engineered for a cloud-centric world. The hardware, as one would expect from Samsung, is of top-notch quality. The T-Mobile 3G network delivers most, if not all, of the time. Most of the apps I love are also available on the device.
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