This week has seen Google pull the plug on two products it once had hight hopes for: Google Inbox and Google+. They now join the huge company’s cemetery of applications, services or hardware, which currently hosts 158 graves; not bad for a company that is barely 20 years old. Old timers like myself have grown weary of Google’s penchant for simply announcing that a service is finished, usually without giving any reasonable explanation as to why.
Among Google’s nine principles of innovation are “ship and iterate”, produce products very quickly, get them to market as a prototype if necessary and use feedback from users to improve them; and “failing well”, eliminating products that do not meet expectations but rather than being a stigma, instead generate pride. Two principles that, together with the other seven, have made the company an ideas factory that pumps out innovation at an impressive rate. At the same time, it systematically disappoints users who have invested time and effort in many of these products, telling them basically to find themselves a substitute.
To what extent does this approach damage Google’s reputation? Failing well is one thing, but leaving users high and dry isn’t good for any company’s reputation. As users, when we decide to adopt a product, we often invest time and effort in learning how to use it, sometimes offering feedback to the company so it can be improved, and sometimes we even become evangelists, spreading the word among friends or writing about our experience… In some cases, as we are using a product and putting our trust in it, we increase our personal investment, making it part of our everyday life and work, storing stuff in it and communicating with other users. All to be lost, as Roy Batty said at the end of Blade Runner, “like tears in the rain”. All that investment of time and effort, and then the company decides to eliminate the product as part of a Spring Clean, prompting us to wonder if it’s worth trying out Google’s next innovation.
I like to think I’m fairly open to trying new products and services. In fact, to be honest, I’m practically addicted to change, to experimentation, to giving new tools a chance even when I’m reasonably satisfied with the ones I’m using. I consider it the right aptitude and attitude for somebody who teaches innovation. Even so, Google’s innovation strategy is beginning to tire even my patience: at times it can even feel plain insulting. But Google isn’t worried: it knows that every time it launches a new product, people will be getting in line to try it out. Even so, isn’t Google in danger of overstepping the mark one of these days?
Reducing the fear of failure is important element in any innovation strategy, especially in fast-moving sectors and when you are a market leader and seen as a trendsetter. But there is a balance, and companies like Google run the risk that people will start to ask themselves whether it is worth signing up to the next innovation if they are just going to have the carpet pulled from under them a couple of years down the road. One thing is failing well and another thing is not caring about your users, not showing any respect or abandoning them after they’ve invested in your product. In short, the danger with constantly failing your users is that your users will end up failing you.
