google is genius and everyone else is stupid
So Google is coming out with a social network like thingy. This will be one of trillions of new products Google has added in the last few years.
What I find interesting about all these new products is that they pretty much all have one thing in common. They're money losers. Even gmail doesn't make money. That of course is the genius. By building lots of apps they get people scared. Google is entering my market.. ahhhhhhhhhh.
The distraction factor is huge. The more time and resources companies spend on fighting Google on these fake fronts is less time and resources on the only one that matters, search. Search is where it's at, search is so much bigger than these other markets it's not even close. No social network, no matter how big or how cool will ever rival the revenue generating power that search does.
Even initiatives like Google Docs are little more than an effort to distract Microsoft. Few companies larger than a few people could use Docs, it's simply to limiting. A 500K limit? Most organizations have millions of documents in Word larger than that. The browser tools are simply not there yet to attack Microsoft in any serious way on the Office front, yet Google has succeeded in making people think that this is a real threat to MS. (MS still made 5 times as much money as Google last year and nearly 7x more profit you know)
So hats off to Google, it's a well designed campaign that seems to be working very well.