Change at the speed of Google
Change is a funny thing. It suffers greatly from the Goldilocks complex and getting it right is no easy thing.
Change too quickly and you run the risk of leaving people behind. Look at the artists whose work was never appreciated in their own time.
They sought to convey a vision too far removed, too far ahead of what was considered ‘just right’ for the times.
But change too slowly and, well… Microsoft learned that (some might say still learning that) when it let Netscape leap ahead with its browser. Ofcourse Microsoft are still with us and Netscape aren’t. Not really anyway.
It is interesting, therefore, to see Google seem both too advanced and too slow. Perhaps it is a measure of how established they have become that this could be so but when I see the wild promise of Wave and the lumbering fool of Buzz I see a company still wonderfully eager in its approach.
Wave astounded me. The early keynote was like a glimpse to a better way of working, a new way in which to communicate. Then it arrived and it baffled most people and failed to find a purpose. I feel it is ahead of its time and that the Wave functions might yet find a place in our daily emails. For me, this is where Google went wrong. They chose to introduce Wave as something new. Perhaps if they had chosen to fold its functionality into Gmail then it would have found an audience as, by osmosis, feature after feature slowly became useful.
And then there is Buzz.
After Twitter became such a huge hit, Google seemed to believe that owning one of the biggest brands on the planet was sufficient to make headway in any exciting new business. But people are more fickle than that and whilst they will be willing to try something new simply based on a trust relationship with a brand, switching allegiency is an altogether different ask.
Navigating the channel between too hot and too cold isn’t easy, not even for Google.
