Google's product portfolio

Take look at this:

List of Google products - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I often wonder how Google does it.

Their product portfolio is incredibly diversified, ranging from search, to social networking, to maps, to operating systems, to web browsers, to hardware.

Of course it's good to have a diversified product portfolio, because if 1 product fails, you have your others to fall back on, but they have so many different products doing so many different things (and many even overlap in functionality and purpose), that I often wonder how they have the man power and funds to keep all of them going.

Thoughts?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DavidP

Thoughts?

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Google geneally seems to be a pretty good thing to me, but if I'd been caught in this:

Wrong kind of buzz around Google Buzz | Net Effect

I'd have sued if at all possible.

So, while the diversification may make sense from a business standpoint, it might not from a consumer standpoint -- it could well be that they are less concerned with quality control, etc, because of it.

A good number of these applications/solutions/services were not developed by google, but bought by google in many of its numerous acquisitions. I'd suspect part of the workforce was allowed to stay. Other products are so small they probably only require one person doing part-time to maintain and come up with new ideas. I've seen successful one-person projects a lot more complex than that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DavidP

Take look at this:


I often wonder how Google does it.

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Just like Mario said, they simply buy good companies that do what they're interested in. Even their main source of revenue that got them off the ground (auctioning ad-words) was from a company called Idealabs (later Goto and then Overture). Google tried to buy idealabs but it didn't happen, so they stole the idea and then settled in court with idealabs. Yahoo actually ended up aquiering Overture.

Diverse, maybe, but the quality of a lot of their software is questionable, at best, so I'm really not impressed - underneath the facade of all of those pretty UI's lies a mess of spaghetti code that only a GW-BASIC programmer could appreciate. Bleck.