Google are historically quite prolific buyers of other companies (94 and counting, according to Wikipedia), and don’t seem to be showing any signs of slowing down. Although most of their acquisitions are small companies, they also swallow up some reasonably sized fish, most recently air fare aggregator ITA Software for a cool $700 million.
Having a diverse portfolio is great, especially for a company like Google who essentially run large tracts of the internet. However, does there come a point when you should stop buying and start making sure your house is in order? By attempting to dominate too many areas of technology (search, advertising, mobile advertising, mobile operating systems, cloud productivity clients, web email, news aggregation, video streaming – to name but a few of the areas in which Google has a significant interest) is Google spreading itself too thin?
Google’s core products are normally polished and eminently usable – think Search, GMail or Android – but if you travel out to the peripheries of what they offer you will discover some real shockers. Used Feedburner recently? It’s like a terrifying nightmare from 2001. Likewise Google’s podcast management app for Android, Listen, sports icons that look as if they’ve been blown up to four times their original size, and for some reason are left languishing in all their pixelated glory. Listen is no small potato either – according to its Android Market stats it has between one and five million downloads.
For a company now boasting 26,000 or so employees, don’t you think one or two could be spared to clean up the mess? Pop over to google.com/account and you’ll see a list of the Google services you use. I have a list of 31 up there – a colleague of mine has 53. Can one company effectively manage that many different products? Google’s arch-nemesis Apple has a product portfolio you can almost count on one hand which – fanboyism aside – are all incredibly polished.
The problem doesn’t show any sign of abating, either. Some products see infrequent refreshes (another of Google’s white elephants, Blogger, saw the first major update to its UI since 2006 earlier this year), however the pace with which Google releases new products seems to mean many older products are left in the dust. The major products on Google’s roadmap (that we know about) include Chrome OS, Google Music, Honeycomb for smartphones, +1, Google Deals and their mobile wallet – all of which will most likely debut this year.
Perhaps Google should institute a “No App Left Behind” programme to ensure their massive portfolio of well-used services is maintained? Every developer will be given responsibility for their creations, and will have to decide to either formally discontinue a product (as famously happened with Wave), or keep it up-to-date. Certainly sounds like a good idea to us Feedburner users.
