jessenoller.com

The offi­cial announce­ment (well, the addi­tion of a web­site for it) of Google’s goo.gl URL short­en­ing service’s new web­site and fea­tures on the 11th got me think­ing really hard about com­pe­ti­tion, and Google. Specif­i­cally — how do you com­pete against the biggest tech­no­log­i­cal behe­moth ever seen by man? Some­thing I’m sure is on a lot of peo­ples’ minds at an increas­ing rate.

To be hon­est, many of these thoughts can prob­a­bly be applied to many incum­bents in the tech indus­try (includ­ing “enter­prise” software/hardware giants), Google is an easy tar­get for these thoughts though, because they are sim­ply so bad at some of this. This is part rant, part thought exper­i­ment – it’s entirely pos­si­ble I am entirely wrong.

What drove me to think­ing about this (for well over a week) is a base ter­ror I felt about the vague pos­si­bil­ity of being in a mar­ket Google might whim­si­cally enter at one point. Like, say I was bit.ly — and hap­pily the most pop­u­lar URL short­en­ing and ana­lyt­ics firm with thou­sands of cus­tomers, mil­lions of short­ened links, etc, etc. How would I feel if Google coughed and sud­denly entered an already tight (some would say arti­fi­cial) mar­ket with all salvos aimed right at my busi­ness (bit.ly seems game)? Can an ecosys­tem of star­tups sur­vive if Google pops into the room – can they still get VCs or Angel investors to lis­ten and invest in them? (See also: whatifgoogledoesit.com).

It’s not that Google sud­denly came out with a “bet­ter” thing then bit.ly — Google sim­ply came out with some­thing which “does the job” to the tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tions they think are supe­rior, sit­ting on Google’s nearly unbeat­able infra­struc­ture and then threw the weight of their brand behind it.

Does it have all the pretty ana­lyt­ics Bit.ly has? No. Does it have cus­tom URLs? No. Does it need all of that? No, because it’s made by Google. The UI is per­fectly func­tional, but noth­ing to write home to mom about. Mil­lions of peo­ple will flock to the new ser­vice and hap­pily use it because it is Google. Bit.ly could very well now be on life sup­port, and will quickly run out of oxy­gen when/if Google ever decided to give pref­er­ence to goo.gl within their sites and appli­ca­tions (see the secu­rity argu­ment in the announce­ments – how long until the other short­en­ers are deemed “too insecure”?).

The very thought of this pos­si­bil­ity hap­pen­ing on some­thing I work on ter­ri­fies me. I’m pretty con­fi­dent on the tech­ni­cal prowess of the teams I work with and of the prod­ucts we make, but I’ll be damned if Google couldn’t wipe us out with a “prod­uct” with 25% of the fea­tures we have, sim­ply because of who they are. Maybe we could scratch by – maybe we already have an estab­lished user base. Maybe Google would kill their imple­men­ta­tion in a few months – who knows.

But Google has a flaw, sev­eral, in fact.

Com­pet­ing with Google on a tech­no­log­i­cal level is incred­i­bly hard — it’s not impos­si­ble, just hard. They have more PHDs and engi­neers per square foot than just about any­one. I think that breath­ing the Google­plex air alone prob­a­bly increases your IQ. I don’t know – I have some of the air on order. It’s easy for Google to build some­thing fifty per­cent of the way and release it, there­fore suck­ing the air out of the room. They don’t even need to “fin­ish” it — the very fact they’ve made it and put it every­where is enough to make a mar­ket dry up and users to flock to it. It will have enough func­tion­al­ity — and just enough — to get the job done (“per­fectly func­tional, albeit Spartan”).

Google is good at raw func­tion­al­ity and util­ity. They solve a prob­lem in nor­mally the most effi­cient way pos­si­ble, and Google is going to prob­a­bly go down as the most suc­cess­ful tech­nol­ogy com­pany in history.

Where Google fails — time and again — is being human.

No one invites Vul­cans from Star Trek to come and dec­o­rate cakes or enter­tain them at a party. No one accuses Vul­cans of hav­ing “really good empa­thy and cus­tomer ser­vice skills”. No, peo­ple call Vul­cans when they need to fig­ure out a hard prob­lem, or need some objec­tive analy­sis. They don’t expect bal­loon ani­mals and a Dora cake from them.

Google is a utility/commodity tech­nol­ogy com­pany (an exceed­ingly shrewd and pow­er­ful one) — but Android wins mar­ket share because it’s on more phones, not because the expe­ri­ence is bet­ter but sim­ply because it’s every­where – it’s on more and more phones every day. Plenty of the man­u­fac­tur­ers who have adopted it spent mil­lions design­ing UIs that sit on top of the default Android UI and make it “more friendly”. Every mar­ket they touch they fun­da­men­tally change the eco­nom­ics and expec­ta­tions of.

Google has become top dog for a rea­son — their tech­nol­ogy. It is really top notch and their search engine and adwords sys­tem changed the mar­ket (for the bet­ter), but it all shares the cold robotic embrace of the other Google prod­ucts. Their tech­ni­cal skills are beyond reproach, but they still lose in many cases against smaller, “richer” appli­ca­tions and sites because they fail at being human.

Expe­ri­ence Matters.

To Google; you are a sta­tis­ti­cal note — some­thing to be tracked, cat­e­go­rized and pro­filed. Why? Not though mal­ice or ill intent — not even slightly — rather, it is how they aim their real busi­ness at you: Adver­tis­ing. Google is not mali­cious, nor is it evil. Google is the log­i­cal robot who will tell you you’ve got can­cer while ask­ing for the time and not even blink. They con­tinue inter­est­ing projects which could change human­ity – but with the bed­side man­ner of a toaster (note though — the cold, cal­cu­lat­ing nature of the projects doesn’t dimin­ish the value).

When a com­pet­ing company’s users are sta­tis­tics: show those sta­tis­tics love and a human face and they will fol­low you to the ends of the earth. Incite pas­sion – give them a rela­tion­ship. A wise man once told me “the only way you can suc­ceed against an entrenched player is by lov­ing your users to death”.

Love your cus­tomers — say you make a code host­ing ser­vice — it’s hard to beat free (as is Google Code) and it’s hard to beat the fact that, yeah, they have all the basic fea­tures a code host should have — but you com­pete where Google can’t. You beat them in the User Inter­face depart­ment — you beat them with warm, invit­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion and a well designed, invit­ing web­site. You beat them by hir­ing a sup­port staff that actu­ally answers emails and picks up the phone. (See also: “Google Gets a C– from the Bet­ter Busi­ness Bureau”)

You com­pete against them by not being a cold, Spar­tan fea­ture robot. You make your thing usable, you make it pleas­ant. You make it so that users want to come back to you again and again because each time they do they don’t feel like they just got a hug from a Crafts­man work­bench. You make them feel like Mom just gave them a warm hug on a Christ­mas day every time they use your prod­uct. Not like mak­ing out with a socket set.

But, you say, Google can make a UI, right? Not quite — Google Wave may have been the best thing in the his­tory of earth: but no one except a few peo­ple could fig­ure out how to really use it. Tech­no­log­i­cally, it was awe­some, usabil­ity? Not so much. It was a bag of tech­ni­cally accu­rate fea­tures – but not a human inter­face. It was a “social net­work” put together by Vulcans.

The biggest thing, in my opin­ion, that Google has brought to the human side of the tech­no­log­i­cal table is that it has helped in recent years by bring­ing back a wave of min­i­mal­ism, sim­plic­ity of inter­face and speed to web appli­ca­tion design as a whole. In the right hands, min­i­mal­ism and sim­plic­ity are pow­er­ful tools. When they’re not in the right hands — well, hugs from a Crafts­man bench.

So — in order to com­pete with Google, you attack them on design – on engage­ment. You make your social fea­tures and good cus­tomer ser­vice into the barbs of loy­alty. You pick up that phone and let them know there’s some­one else at the end of the line will­ing to hear them out at 3am when every­thing goes to hell and they’re all alone. Even if that cus­tomer is crazy, you show them the respect they deserve as people.

Get vocal, pas­sion­ate users and build a loyal com­mu­nity — that alone will help you suc­ceed against Google. Make sure your cus­tomers know you love them, know that you sup­port them and want them to suc­ceed. Don’t just enable them to do some­thing, enable them to connect.

Build a brand against Google. Don’t be con­tent with doing some­thing — make sure you’re not just “the guys that did that thing” — or “those guys who came out with that thing”. Make your name syn­ony­mous with that thing. Make it so that the first thing peo­ple think of when con­sid­er­ing that thing is you.

Make it so that Google could come out with — say a video shar­ing site — tomor­row, and while it could be the best, most dis­trib­uted video thing ever (the bet­ter tech­no­log­i­cal choice) make it so that your users are so fiercely loyal that Google has to buy you and extin­guish the flames of the pas­sion you’ve incited just to get the announce­ment for their new thing two min­utes of air time.

You can only do these things — build­ing a brand — and build­ing a “cult” by doing the things Google — given its robotic fail­ings — can­not do. Love your users, infect them with your pas­sion — not just your tech­ni­cal prowess or abil­ity to scale or release new web codecs, or give them the right search results, or giv­ing away source – infect them with your pas­sion for what you do. Sup­port them, respond to them — even if you’re giv­ing it away for free — after all, noth­ing is free.

Pas­sion, com­pas­sion — con­nect­ing with other humans, peo­ple are always look­ing for a place that accepts them and makes them feel wel­come. They want to get real sup­port instead of emails that get sent to unknown voids and are never answered. Mak­ing things warm, invit­ing both in lan­guage and in the feel.

Just remem­ber — Google is a fan­tas­tic, nearly unbeat­able tech­ni­cal pow­er­house. You’ve got to be fast, high qual­ity and bet­ter where it counts the most.

“What about Don’t Be Evil?”, you say. Again, this is not an accu­sa­tion of Google being evil – they’re not. They’re being coldly log­i­cal in the way humans deal­ing with other humans aren’t. When Eric Schmidt, the CEO, stands up on stage and talks about pri­vacy being dead in the age we live in (the age of Face­book, and Twit­ter), or the refuge for crim­i­nals – he’s not “being evil”. He’s rep­re­sent­ing the coldly log­i­cal, algo­rithm based view of a search engine, and adver­tise­ment com­pany. (Check out duckduckgo.com)

In the age of blogs, Face­book, Twit­ter, MySpace and online med­ical records and a mil­lion other things, the log­i­cal exten­sion is that, yes – pri­vacy will be dead in a mat­ter of years. Look at the train wreck the buzz roll­out was – they shipped with the log­i­cal, auto-following and auto-public set­tings and features.

How­ever, nuk­ing years of email or delist­ing someone’s web­site with no human recourse is evil, and there­fore, can be used as a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage against them. Be more pri­vate, be avail­able to your cus­tomers. I know it’s expen­sive – but it’s how you can win. First mover advan­tage counts for a lot, but it doesn’t count for any­thing if you fail your com­mu­nity and users.

I use lots — and I do mean lots — of Google projects. I live in the lap of Google lux­ury as they give me free things that have “enough” fea­tures to sate my needs and require­ments. They’re pretty enough — sort of like my code edi­tor. I’m not pas­sion­ate about them, they’re func­tional util­i­ties (albeit incred­i­bly use­ful ones) — and at this point I’d prob­a­bly been inop­er­a­ble with­out a few of them. Google is a verb — JGI (Just Google it) leaves my mouth an innu­mer­able num­ber of times through the day. I have lots of friends who work at Google. Google has released an amaz­ing amount of open source soft­ware, and con­tinue to work on chang­ing the face of the Inter­net, and soci­ety as a whole.

But would I say their UIs are beau­ti­ful? No. Would I ever be con­vinced that send­ing an email about my account being bro­ken or dis­abled to Google’s sup­port line would be met with any­thing but metal­lic robot silence? Do I think pleas to relist my web­site in their index or rein­state an adwords account would be any more effec­tive then yelling at my garbage dis­posal? No.

No, none of these are true. Github (despite it being git) and bit­bucket are the bet­ter UIs for code host­ing — Word­Press and oth­ers are bet­ter hosted blog­ging sys­tems then Blog­ger, and so on, and so on. These ser­vices prob­a­bly don’t scale as well, or they can’t cal­cu­late the veloc­ity of an unladen swal­low if you hit control-m-x-y-*, but they com­pete with Google where it counts.

Com­pete with Google where it hurts the most: Being Human.

The offi­cial announce­ment (well, the addi­tion of a web­site for it) of Google’s goo.gl URL short­en­ing service’s new web­site and fea­tures on the 11th got me think­ing really hard about...