Google has no faith in its ability to launch new products
google products rant · 9 comments · 400 words · read ~625 times.
Back when I was a product manager for a large mobile network operator, we faced a constant problem. How do you launch a new product to the public?
Most people are reluctant to try new things. Even in the exciting world of proto-smartphones, convincing someone to download, install, configure, and use a new app was difficult. Sure, we could run expensive advertising campaigns. Send hopeful text messages. Have a big celebrity endorsement. Or maybe get our customer service reps to push it.
In the end, we pre-installed it on every device we sold. Then we forcibly pushed it to every supported phone on our network. The backlash was incredible. As you might expect, people think of their phones as their own personal space. Having a new app shoved on there felt like an invasion. It took up memory space, true, but more importantly it took up psychological space. We had reminded customers that we thought of them as little more than cattle; a resource we controlled with an aim to extract value.
Google is in a similar boat today. They have absolutely no confidence that their Gemini AI Assistant is any good. They've run countless tests with customers and it is a dud. But they've invested a lot of money, so it needs to launch. Customers, in the main, decline to install it and they certainly refuse to pay for it. So what's Google's solution?
They have forcibly installed it, jacked up the prices, and made it impossible to remove.
These are not the actions of a company which believes in its own products.
To be fair to Google, it is a problem seen in many businesses. They crave instant success, they want to see massive overnight numbers, and they have a winner-takes-all mentality. But the real world isn't like that. Customers aren't morons but they lead busy and complex lives. You product is important to you, but it is utterly irrelevant to most customers. It is your job to convince people that your product has merits. You have to listen to them and get their consent.
People don't deserve to be tricked into installing something. Forcing people to use your product is disrespectful
@Edent Google Workspace domain admins actually have to log a support call requesting that the Gemini on/off switches be enabled... https://martinh.net/@m/113849671256146090
Martin Hamilton (@m@martinh.net)
@Edent There was a time back in the 1990s and early 2000s when I really looked forward to trying new software. Not anymore.
Spot on!
@blog ... plus in this case a source of misinformation AND extra climate destroying emissions...
Google has no faith in its ability to launch new products | Hacker News
mike says:
I've been hearing an advert for Gemini on podcasts in which the use case for it is a man asking it about how well the unspecified football team he supports will do this season. Gemini provides some totally generic comments about the criteria that may affect how this team performs. I find it a very strange advert because it is beyond me what value this provides to even someone who isn't me and has a football team they support, and if the comments were specific to that team. Why would anyone care what Gemini thinks about their football team's chances of anything? A team of people, probably quite a big one, will have brainstormed ideas about how to advertise this new "AI" product and when vague comments about a football team was evidently considered sufficiently good to implement, it's difficult to imagine how much worse ideas they rejected were.
Within the last hour I've seen an advert for Gemini on YouTube and it was also very strange because it presented lots of use cases that are also essentially the same very vague one, talk to it about something. It skips through multiple people all asking if they can talk to it about something and it replying that they can. But there's no attempt to explain why you'd want to talk to about any of those things, there's no examples of what it might say about any of the subjects. As the vague chat about football ad does, it comes off almost like they're selling it as a fake friend people can discuss something that interests them with if they have no one else to talk to about that, including somehow not even via a forum or Facebook group or Reddit or such online place where they'd at least get what other humans reckon rather than the hallucinations of algorithms.
As an Android user I have noticed Gemini is on my phone only because a few times I've done some sort of swipe/tap combo I didn't mean to and a small dialogue box has appeared suggesting I ask Gemini a question. On first encountering this I was able to very swiftly dismiss the dialogue box. Which was nice.
Hear, hear!
All that money to build a new product that’s awful, when keeping great products like Jamboard running would have been so much cheaper.
@blog well said! They have forgotten their own value, "Respect the user."
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