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October 30, 2008
Delivering Value To The Average Joe
Earlier today, I came across Google's mobile application for finding voting locations. This is just the latest entry in Google's continual release of tools that are intended to help it become for "valuable" to its users. It is a pragmatic mashup of Google technologies applied to a specific need.
In comparison to Apple or Microsoft, each of which continue to pour money into advertising to let us know why we need them, Google has never been a big advertiser. It started as the "simple search" in comparison to the tools that Yahoo and others were releasing. Instead of trying to build a taxonomy for the Web, Google understood that Web search would be about finding a "needle in a haystack" better. Their user interface wasn't elegant...by comparison it almost looked like a mistake. But, they did in fact do a better job...and the rest is history.
Today, Google has more money and more smart people than the competition, so they can invest in the constant stream of "value tools" to hold their pre-eminent position. And cracking their hegemony will take an equivalent focus on value, because funny as a may seem to ad people, value really does make a difference to the "Average Joe."
Posted by jcioban at October 30, 2008 8:41 AM
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