Question: Google - the case continues: customers and product development
Beyond its core search and advertising capabilities, the company has embarked on ventures involving online productivity, blogging, radio and television advertising, online payments, social networks, mobile phone operating systems, and many more information domains. What information management tools the company hasn't developed it has acquired: Picasa for photo management; YouTube for online videos; DoubleClick for web ads; Keyhole for satellite photos (now Google Earth); Urchin for web analytics (now Google Analytics). Google engineers prototype new applications on the platform; if any of these begin to get users' attention, developers can launch beta [test] versions to see whether the company's vast captive customer base responds enthusiastically.
If one of the applications becomes a hit, Google's enormous ‘cloud' of computing capability can make room for it. In the development process, Google simultaneously tests and markets them to the user community. In fact, testing and marketing are virtually indistinguishable from one another. This creates a unique relationship with consumers, who become an essential part of the development team as new products take shape and grow. Google does more than just alpha and beta test applications - it can host them on its infrastructure. Google's customers then transition seamlessly from testing to using products as they would any other commercial offering. The company allows independent developers to share access and create new applications that incorporate elements of the Google system. They can easily test and launch applications and have them hosted in the Google world, where there is an enormous target audience - 132 million customers globally - and a practically unlimited capacity for customer interactions.
Case questions 12.2
· What benefits do you expect Google will gain from this close involvement with developers?
· What do the developers gain?
· What may be the risks to either Google or the developers?