A recent poll asked U.S. consumers their overall opinions of four big tech brands: Facebook, Apple, Google and Twitter. Despite controversies involving user privacy, Google was a the clear winner, earning a favorable opinion from four out of five respondents. Twitter brought up the rear. “I suspect mass audiences don’t quite know what [Twitter] is good for,” said GigaOM Pro’s David Card.
What Google seems to have forgotten is that we were only willing to give them all that data in the first place because it gave us great products and seemed trustworthy.
Google has forgotten why we loved it. It has degraded its premier product in service of promoting others. It has done devious things to ferret out information from its users that they do not willingly provide. It is too much focused on the future, and conversely too scared of current competition.
Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo’s well-respected head of its Labs unit and also recently its head of strategy, is leaving the company to take a job at Google. The departure comes ahead of possibly deep cuts in his division, which is in charge of long-term research at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, said sources.
This is interesting because maps are obviously a vital part of location-based services. And while a few have picked Bing Maps over Google Maps, I can’t recall any service as big as Foursquare, which was using Google for so long, ditching them in favor of the open alternative (as they note, several smaller startups have, often due to cost — which was also why Foursquare started looking for other alternatives).
Worth noting that this only impacts the Foursquare website right now — the iPhone and Android apps will continue to use Google Maps since both of those OSes offer Google Maps in their SDKs.
But that brings up something else: how long is Apple going to stick with Google Maps? At the time of the iPhone launch, it was really the only good solution (and they had a great relationship with Google). Now there are several options (and the Google relationship has gone to shit).
I think it’s quite possible that the only reason Apple hasn’t switched to another alternative at this point is because they continue to work on their own solution.
A presentation by Larry Cornett of Brilliant Forge used for a Product Management conference. It highlights the power of Product Experience, some best practices for User-Centered Product Design (UCD), a brief discussion of the role of Product Management, and a use case from a product redesign at eBay.
Citigroup Interwebs analyst Mark Mahaney created this chart of the U.S. share of time spent online at Facebook, Google sites, Yahoo sites, Microsoft sites, and AOL. Huge increase for Facebook compared to Google. Microsoft has a slight decline. Yahoo’s decline is steeper. But, poor AOL is dropping like a stone. Of course, the real concern for all of these players when you look at time spent on their sites is that this correlates with advertiser interest and dollars spent. Not surprising that they want to shift their advertising spend to the places where the consumers are spending their time the most.
Brilliant Forge is a Product Strategy & Design consultancy. With more than 18 years of experience in the industry ranging from small startups to large global corporations, I share my best practices and knowledge of how to successfully design products and services for Consumer Markets.loading tweets…
