Did you know that Ford motor company owned iron mines, rubber plantations and limestone quarries? Henry Ford thought that Ford motor co needed to be self-sufficient, producing all raw materials needed to make automobiles. Sanity has prevailed with time and Ford is only making automobiles now. No one can be an expert in everything and there are bound to be experts in each field. As individual component manufacturers have grown efficient, business have focused on their core businesses, relieved themselves of non-core businesses and used efficient vendors/partners. This seems to be the prevailing market trend in web technology markets too, as companies have focused on core competencies (or pursued innovations to capture new markets).
One relatively young company has been bucking this trend and that too in a very successful/profitable manner. Google has been making Maps, Earth, Docs, Spreadsheets, Emails, Groups, Webpage making software, Checkout and may be wireless next. Google is a company, I admire and it has been very good in beating competitors, even in its non-core businesses. How is Google able to break the universal efficiency/expertise trend?
Simple, Google is not selling these products to meet customer expectations. It is also focusing on its core business, which is online-ads. It is only offering these products as a vehicle to sell his product-ads. For ex, he is selling his ads, when you use Google Earth, Checkout and docs.
What does this mean to the consumer? Isn’t free a good thing? Yes and No. If you are a casual user and don’t care for quality software consistently five years from now, you should obviously utilize the “free” Google products. But Google is an ad-product company. It would be hard for it to consistently deliver a high quality product in say, Google Docs while its focus is on its core ad business. Obviously an online editor software co is going to be more customer-focused and on-the-job in making “Docs” than Google. If I were a serious business user or have long term plans for software, I would look twice into the long term usability and roadmap of the free software I use.
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