You have to feel sorry for the Google engineer who apparently let the cat out of the bag by saying that Google+ was an afterthought and had not been thought out properly before it was launched.
It was meant to be an email to an associate, but actually was inadvertently sent to hundreds of people who lapped up their words and it quickly made its way into the media.
Whether, or not, that the engineer in question remains with Google for long for being blasphemous about the Company’s latest new product we can only surmise, but it’s unlikely to do his long term prospects any good.
But it does raise an interesting question. When you as big as Google, does it really matter if you’re late to the party, or not? And if you have big enough pockets, can you get back into the game.
Major tech companies do take on God like status, but they are not infallible and often, ironically, are so immersed in their own products and services, that they don’t see the next big thing coming. Take Microsoft for example, a company which dominates the software sector. It was slow seeing the search engine explosion and the coming switch to cloud computing.
Arguable, because Google ran head in the race, Microsoft lost a major opportunity in the search engine market which Bing cannot reclaim. And now Google is too big for Microsoft to try the other accepted alternative, use your funds to gobble up the competition.
So, although Google is proclaiming 40 million users for its Plus service, has it forever missed out to leader of the pack Facebook, which enjoys some 750 million odd users. And by then, will Facebook will expensive to buy anyway, even for the mighty Google?
Attribute to: Neil Martin, Cayenne Red.
Neil Martin is a UK SEO Consultant at Reading based PPC Agency Cayenne Red and is a regular contributor to the media on how companies market themselves in the digital age.