You Sell the Sizzle, Not the Steak

Posted on June 13, 2006
Filed Under Companies |

The title of this post is a catch phrase my good friend Glenn Perry always uses… it definitely applies to Google. Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows I’m down on Google for everything from their China policy to the perpetual beta existence they seem to reside in. I do think that a large part of the influencer market is turning on Google for the simple reason that their services are largely me-too or simply uninspiring in their execution, and worse is that they don’t stitch them together to be a true suite, like what Microsoft did a decade ago. For that matter, it doesn’t seem like Google values service integration at all considering that very few of them actually connect together. In other words, there’s lot’s of sizzle but the steak itself is a dry and tough.

The other irony about Google is that their bread-and-butter (sorry for all the food analogies in this post) search is so popular that they are forced to spend all the bulk of their resources engineering it for scale and counter-attacking against the pagerank gamers. Where is the relevance capability, or better visualization options?

In the interests of being fair, Google does get credit for coming up with some really cool services like Maps and Gmail (which even though it isn’t that different from other email services, works really well), and Google Scholar. They also have acquired some companies and turned the products loose for free, like Sketchup.

Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact: Can there be too much of a good thing? Some Google watchers are beginning to think so. Leading technology bloggers’ reactions to Google Spreadsheets, which allows users to build and share simple Excel-like spreadsheets on line, have ranged from lukewarm to hostile.

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