Google and Complexity
November 19, 2010
Quote to note: I almost feel bad for Google. Facebook integrates email into its social messaging. Google is still trying to find a way to get the Math Club invited to the prom. Now the Google TV earns one of those New York Times-type reverse back flip with a twist belly flops. To get the context for Google TV, point your browser at “Google TV, Usability Not Included”. [If the link goes dead, you will have to birddog the original article at Starbuck’s or on the NYT’s own Web site.] The write up “reviews” the lean back with your controller and enjoy an insufficiently aged mash up of TV and Web. I am not much of a TV person, so I can’t relate to what Google has created or devoted so much development time. The number of Google rich media patent applications is interesting in itself. Googlers, when not thinking about the distribution of primes watches TV, looks at Web sites, and does all matter of content grazing. I pretty much do one thing at a time and find my limited intelligence stretched to its limit when I try to do two things at once.
Here’s the killer point in the write up in my opinion:
This much is clear: Google TV may be interesting to technophiles, but it’s not for average people. On the great timeline of television history, Google TV takes an enormous step in the wrong direction: toward complexity.
The point is that Google is working overtime to find a way to pump up its revenue. Now the company is big and growing, but the “next big thing” seems to be located down the road or across the street, not in the Google’s expansive manse.
Forget Google. The economy is no good. Overly complex systems in the enterprise or in the grubby hands of consumers is not where the action is. At a recent conference, the principal knock against established enterprise software was that it was too tough to figure out, too expensive, and too complicated. Our neighbor asked me to fix the family’s Windows 7 machine. I told the neighbors to buy a Mac. Who has time or energy to figure out how to troubleshoot software arguably more complicated than IBM CICS?
As we head into 2011, my hunch is that the big story is not the success of Roku or Netflix. The increasing complexity of Google’s products and services has become a defining characteristic of the company. I don’t know how to get “clean” search results any more when I run a query. Exalead, DuckDuckGo, and Blekko are getting more of my time. Google TV gets none of it, and probably not too much of my neighbors’ time either. When I want to watch a TV show, I just look in the newspaper or the cable TV guide. To do Webby things, I have other gizmos that work just fine; for example, my Toshiba NB 305 or my iPad. Complexity is no longer a benefit to me.
Stephen E Arnold, November 19, 2010
Freebie
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