Mike Maney

Tag: Facebook

  • If I Ran Google+…

     

    I’ve been pretty vocal about my views on how Google is blowing a huge, industry-shifting opportunity with Google+. Most of those views are centered around the company’s inability to know when to let professional marketers take the handoff from the engineers (and accept that it’s ok).

    This morning, my friend and fellow corporate misfit, Greg Lowe, posted his views on why he’s abandoning the Google+ party until it figures out how to make its various systems work together. Greg’s not alone. And that’s when it hit me: What would I do if I was running Google+’s marketing today?

    Would I allocate gobs of cash from my search business to promote this new product that — according to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt — has the potential to replace search as the backbone of the company? I could. It’s not like Google doesn’t have the money to make Google+ a household name like Facebook or Twitter.

    Would I pay a bunch of celebrities and brands bucketloads of moolah to make my new product look cool to people not immediately related to Robert Scoble? I could. Twitter has shown that tactic works pretty well.

    Would I initiate basic political and competitive campaign tactics to reshape how press, analysts and other influencers define the market? I could and would.

    No, what I’d do is much simpler.

    The biggest problem with Google+ right now isn’t that it’s UI is ugly or that people like Greg can’t log in from their different Google accounts. Google+’s biggest problem is that it’s marketing team isn’t harnessing the power of its most passionate customer base: those who take the time to complain about the product’s current shortcomings (early adopters who are core to the growth of the product).

    My fix? Have a strike team scour Google+, Twitter and the web for any and all complaints about the product. Capture them. Catalog them. Categorize them. Communicate them. And then turn the engineers lose fixing them. As each issue is addressed, check it off. Keep the list public. There’s a built-in, passionate product marketing department already built into Google: its customers.

    People want Google to be successful with Google+. The meteoric sign-ups show many are looking for something that builds on the early foundations laid by Facebook and Twitter. But unless Google gets some basic marketing religion — and gets it fast — their constant drumbeat of “It had potential…” flops will increasingly erode confidence in the company’s core geek foundation.

  • Theoretically Speaking: Google vs Microsoft

    I’ve got a hunch that this week’s Google+ news is the first volley in a tectonic shift for the tech industry. While conventional wisdom puts the battle between Google and Facebook for control of the so-called social graph, the real battle is fermenting between Google and Microsoft.

    In one corner:

    • GoogleApps (docs, video, email, cal)
    • Search
    • Google+

    In the other corner:

    Microsoft has been slow — if not outright absent — in the present day war among everyday consumers…outflanked by the speed, agility and popularity of Google and Facebook. Yet it still remains a force to be reckoned (arguments aside about how it obtained that force). It’s Office suite is still king and increasingly becoming more Google-like. It has done a nice job of staying alive, if not thriving in search. Hotmail still has, last I heard, a huge following. And the purchase of Skype was thought by many to be a shrewd move to enhance its enterprise business (although it looks like enterprise may not have been the primary or sole reason for the acquisition). Microsoft is slowly, if not stealthily, encroaching on Google’s hallowed turf.

    Google, despite a slew of missteps (which happens when a company refuses to let a product make a transition from engineering to marketing), has used its apps products to encroach on Microsoft’s stranglehold. Not so much from functionality, but as a tool to cause people to question whether they need traditional software…Redmond’s bread and butter. And, now, with Google+, it has the ability to thwart Microsoft’s plans for Skype.

    Except Microsoft has that hidden and oft-forgotten ace up its sleeve: Its investment in Facebook (and Facebook’s hatred of all things G). Skype + Facebook — if the rumor pans out next week — puts Microsoft and Google on equal footing. In fact, I’d go so far to say that given the consumerization of IT and Microsoft’s embedded position in the enterprise, it could put Microsoft back into the tech driver’s seat.

    If my hunch plays out, we’ve got ourselves an unbelievable dogfight coming in the tech industry. And when it happens — when two behemoths push themselves to out do and out innovate each other — you and I win.

  • The 2008 Cloud Computing All-Stars


    One of the most talked about technologies of 2008 was unquestionably cloud computing (okay, maybe not unquestionably…this is the tech industry, afterall). Cloud computing — from consumer-level apps such as Facebook to big company entries such as Microsoft’s Azure — dominated a good part of the tech conversation over the past year.

    And, like most hot technologies, a number of key players emerged. While my role in cloud computing flirts primarily around the periphery (i.e., I don’t write code), I am close enough to the conversation to notice which players seem to sit at the epicenter of the discussion.

    Among the creme of the crop are five who I believe make up The 2008 Cloud Computing All-Star Team:

    1. Jeff Barr (Amazon’s web services god)
    2. Michael Sheehan (GoGrid evangelist extraordinaire)
    3. Reuven Cohen (Enomaly founder and Cloud Camp instigator using open source to make the cloud elastic)
    4. Sam Charrington (Appistry VP using cloud application platform to put a hurt on the legacy app server market)
    5. Chris Gladwin (CEO of Cleversafe and the guy behind one of the hottest cloud storage technologies of ’08)

    Which cloud computing players would you recruit for your all-star team? Let me know in the comments.

    [Disclosure: Appistry is a client.]

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