I just thought I would make a - maybe obvious - comment on what google really does.

Google is a time saver. That is all they do. Everyday in everyway a Google person on some Google farm says to another googler, "hey, how can this save people time?"

Lets look at some examples:

Search engines save people time by connecting them more accurately with what they are looking for. I spent 2 hours finding the right site in 1998, now it takes me ten minutes.

Google Adwords saves EVERYONE time by associating adwords advertisments with people who are interested. I can't tell you how stupid and time-wasteful it is to show a young woman who is watching some soap opera a spot for Viagra. Her time is being wasted. That won't happen on google.

Google's reader - which I really enjoy and will tout as a clear breakthrough in organization - is a mini-web viewer, meant to quickly and efficiently give me what I want to read from the sites I like. Its benefits include tracking, organization, etc., but its main benefit is clearly that it saves me a TON of time.

Google's office products appear to be a challenge to MS office and perhaps someday they will be a serious contender. But right now they look to me to be a short cut to sharing. How? Well it takes time to throw together a spreadsheet and then send it to 5 people and ask their opinions and get 5 spreadsheets back with different changes / suggestions. This is also true with the "track changes" feature in word. At work we write these large documents (for proposals) where everyone contributes, isn't it faster for us all just to write them online?

Google Maps are a clear time saver in terms of interface. You know where you are and where you are going more quickly and with more accuracy. But what is often missed is the little things, like the fact that don't need to format your address when you enter it into the map search field - it formats it for you. And you can share the map as easily as you can see it yourself. Both features save time.

Google Financial is an attempt to collect all the tools you might need to make a decision into one place. The idea is to make the decision as quickly and as painless as possible.

Google news collects very disparate news sources and applies its search engine to sorting it all so you can read what you want - not wasting time reading the things you don't.

Blogger allows me to self publish in a jiffy. I woke up at 4:30, sleepless, and had this idea, fired up the computer, wrote it down and published it in about 15 minutes.

Google desktop is a total time saver in tons of ways. I use it as my task list, as a quick way to look at the weather, the local news and of course it is the ONLY way I can search my damn computer. I am connected to a vast client archive of work on a file server, and if what I want isn't immediately associated with a client, then I use google desktop and find it in a jiffy.

The overall point here may be obvious, but I think it is worth emphasizing. Google perhaps does provide more accurate results with its search engine, but I am not going to go around saying google's differentiation is precision or accuracy. Instead, Googles real claim to a definite holistic goal, or point, is that faster better access through an improved interface will save me time.

Time. That's what google offers.

Labels: Business Differentiation, Google