“If your product is Great, it doesn’t need to be Good!” Sounds crazy? Just yesterday, I came across this post on Paul Buccheit’s blog. Buccheit, as most of you may know is the creator of Gmail — he worked on Gmail as a Google Engineer. The entire post makes for excellent reading, but this little bit is the most interesting:
What’s the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product — the rest is noise. For example, the original iPod was: 1) small enough to fit in your pocket, 2) had enough storage to hold many hours of music and 3) easy to sync with your Mac (most hardware companies can’t make software, so I bet the others got this wrong). That’s it — no wireless, no ability to edit playlists on the device, no support for Ogg — nothing but the essentials, well executed.
Google Buzz launched less than 24 hours earlier as I sit tapping out this post, and I couldn’t help wonder if it’s got the 3 key features that Buccheit talks about. One of the questions that they ask you in an interview goes like this, “Explain Object Oriented Design to your Grandma.” Well, the point of asking that question is to see if you can put across something in your specific area of expertise to someone that’s totally ignorant of that field. However, in the context of Google Buzz, it would be an equally pertinent question, “Explain Google Buzz to your Grandma!”
The Google BUZZword
It’s a masterstroke to integrate Buzz with Gmail – which already has 176 million visitors a month. That’s a LOT of users that get to check out Google Buzz. But the point is, a LOT of these users will be your average Joe-type of users. Not tech enthusiasts, not web developers, not programmers. The key to whether Buzz is a success or not lies in if these Joes and Janes can find the product intuitive enought to use. If they can’t figure out how to use it – or what it’s for – in the first … may be 10 minutes that they try it out, it’s unlikely they’ll bother to come back and use it again. And that is what Twitter is so good at – simplicity is it’s biggest USP. It’s simple – and that is the beauty of it. Google Buzz might have a lot of potential, but if you can’t explain it to your Dad who uses email just to keep in touch with his friends in other parts of the country/world, then it’s not going to help Google with their foray into Social.
What do you think? Have you tried out Google Buzz. Feel free to buzz in your comments 
Filed under: Computing, consumer, technology Tagged: | consumer, google, technology, user
It’s useful being able to find what my industry friends on? Twitter and Facebook are talking about a idea I am searching for without having to waste my time on either social site experiencing off topic communication.I love networking sites but I really don’t care what kind of cookies you are making. Only getting what I want from my friends is going to make them more valuable to me and keep me from getting sidetracked when I am trying to get real work done.
[...] well, successful for want for a better word. The challenge for any new technology, as I’ve said in the past, is when your Dad will start using [...]
Really I think that Google Buzz’s release was a little premature, especially with the recent concern of privacy. I also think that Google’s possibly going down the same path that Windows experienced around the time of Windows 2K. There products and products seem to be less and less planned and I also feel like rushed to attempt to be a first to market, and compete with its competitors releases. The breach of privacy was an issue that did not require a computer science degree to figure out, a very basic review session would have shown these issues. Do you think Google may have received too much credit last year?
Well, yes, in a way, Buzz’s release may have been a little … well, with a few chinks in the armor, but if you look at Google, they work on the ‘release-early-and-iterate’ philosophy. So probably in line with that. And to their credit, they fixed most of the really serious issues REAL fast.
Yes, the privacy thing should’ve been better thought out. But IMHO, privacy is dead. RIP Privacy. I’ve been thinking about writing a separate post on that one, but in a nutshell, I think privacy is a tricky issue. Look all around – Facebook’s recent changes, location-based services streaming to Twitter (the recent Foursquare incident), so well… I think the real thing was that Buzz was built into Gmail that made an oversight a really serious issue!