Google Bad Day?

I heard about the demise of Google Wave last week and I’ve been reading a large number of the hundreds of blog posts and tweets that accompanied it and continue to do so. I’m not going to try to capture all of these but the TechCrunch and Mashable articles are as good a summary as any.

One article suggested that Google does simple things very well but doesn’t do complex things well, it suggested that where the concept (not necessarily the technology) is simple, such as with search and mail, it flourishes, but where there is more conceptual complexity or a larger leap forward then Google struggles.

I’m not sure that I totally agree with this argument but during the week when Wave was ‘crashing against the shore’ as someone put it I was taking a second attempt at swapping from using iPhone onto an Android device. In this case the Google Nexus One.

My primary motivation for the swap was some rubbish customer service from O2 when trying to change my “bolt on” on my account.

Anyone who has tried this and has texted the number that O2 provide to get a response “you are not subscribed to that bolt on” as a response and then had to deal with a call centre in some far flung country where you get assurances but then find you’re charged for the service you have asked to cancel will understand my frustration.

Anyhow coming back to Android the main downfall of the Nexus One in my opinion is the complete failure of Google to support devices which might need to connect to Wifi networks in ‘work based’ environments and to provide methods to address different ‘proxy’ and network types. There are 623 messages on this thread in the Google Code forum but the upshot is Google did a bad thing omitting this and haven’t addressed it in the 18 months since it was first highlighted. For me this is a ‘show stopper’ and not only did I attempt many of the suggestions and found them unsatisfactory solutions but also having spent this much time on the issue I was not very pleased with how the Android phone is set up considering it doesn’t rely on ‘syncing’ with a PC and therefore the importance of the Wifi connectivity should have been paramount to the success of the device in the workplace.

It would put me off buying it in a corporate capacity or recommending it to others to do so until this is addressed. It doesn’t seem to be affecting the take up for the device by end users but I think Google are missing a big market by not fixing this problem. (and only working with some Wifi networks, e.g. eduroam, is not enough).

It may appear in my blog posts that I’ve got a firm opinion on these things but that’s not the case and I’d like to hear other opinions about how well or badly Google handles the delivery of the more complex. I’d like to think that Google can put Wave and Buzz behind it and start afresh to hit Facebook in the social arena after conducting some good research, or studies research done by others and investigated the area well enough to deliver something that users really want.

I want to end by saying that I used and liked Wave because it did bring something new to the table in terms of allowing the blending of synchronous and asynchronous sharing of ideas and it could have been developed into a strong CRM or mind mapping solution for example, but it wasn’t in itself enough to provide stick-ability. It needed a killer application.  Buzz is in danger of suffering the same fate however I applaud Google for trying though and not a lot of concept stuff becomes commercially viable so accept that and move forward to the next big thing.

Gadgets

I’ve been playing with (evaluating for research purposes) the new breed of Asus Eee (900). I really like it, the thing it has over it’s previous version is the larger screen size. It doesn’t seem that much bigger, you notice that the bits where the speakers were has gone and the screen looks less like a letterbox but the real difference is when you view very text heavy sites especially those sites which have some fixed fonts/navigation panes and other such stuff which meant a lot of scrolling on the old Eee. It’s a highly enjoyable little machine.

We’ve also got two flips on order and I’m looking forward to those little gadgets. I really like the way you can do the ‘straight to YouTube’ stuff with them. Patrickshowed me a competitor to the flip and it was great fun and very useful to have at the conference he was hosting. He hasn’t blogged about it yet but I’m sure he will. These are relatively low quality (640×480) video devices with built in hard drive that up load direct via USB to PC or straight onto YouTube. They make video blogging very simple and also because they’re tiny they are very easy to keep on you to catch that special occasion. They are in the top ten fastest selling gadgets in the U.S. so keep an eye out for them. They’re only about £100.

Finally some not so good gadget news. Despite my best efforts I haven’t been able to get a Sony eBook Reader or Kindle. We spoke to Amazon about the Kindle and they said it’s US only and you need both a US postal address and credit card to order one. We suggested they market it internationally and they said they had no plans to do so at the moment. Sony was a similar story. I’ve also not been able to supply a work iPhone because Apple Europe are marketing the iPhone as a home user device and not a ‘business device’. The distinction here is that we can’t order these on behalf of people in the organisation because the contract etc. must sit with them, also the way the contract is set up is all a nonsense. I’ve told Apple’s European marketing manager about it and he did send a nice reply but said that Apple was currently not supplying it as a business device and he would try to get this changed but thought it would be unlikely to happen soon.

This wouldn’t annoy me so much but that the Sony and Kindle devices are both based on eInk which was pioneered in Cambridge Research labs just down the road from us (along with sites in the US and Japan which also worked on derivatives). We were in discussion with them about getting the raw eInk technology to use with an SDK but they stopped replying to us when it came close to launch so I guess we’re not allowed this until the US says we can have it. Boo!