5:27 AM
admin
Image Google HealthMake Money Blog$:There is a curious disconnect between Google’s [GOOG] mission (“organize the world’s information”) and what Google actually does to earn a living (“find stuff quickly, easily and elegantly”).
The disconnect helps explain Google’s embarrassing succession of failures. First Orkut, Then Wave. Then Buzz. And just last week, Google Health and Google Powermeter were canned.
The disconnect also helps explain why Google+ is not likely to be the solution to Google’s future either.
Time therefore for Google to rethink its mission.
Google: Why we love you
We love Google because we like finding even obscure stuff with blinding speed. It is elegant and simple, with no intrusive commercials. The commercials are there if you want them, they don’t get in the way. I like the commitment to do no evil. And I am happy that in the process Google has somehow managed to make a ton of money. I like the fact that Google has the best talent and seems to treat them well. I like the seemingly enlightened management. I liked the way Google went public. Overall, I—and many others—are delighted.
Google’s mission is clear, simple and wrong
What Google does in its core business is wonderful. Its mission statement is another kettle of fish.
Unlike most mission statements, which are a jumble of words put together by a committee, representing the lowest common denominator of what the company does, and to which in any event no one pays any attention, Google’s mission statement is a model of clarity and crispness:
Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Unfortunately, it’s the wrong mission.
Libraries don’t make money
Let’s think about it for a moment. Organize the world’s information? In other words, build a gigantic library.
Now don’t get me wrong. Libraries are wonderful things. Being a bookish kind of person, I happen to love them. Down the ages, they have served thinkers, preserved knowledge and constituted the basis for science, enlightenment and ultimately civilization. Libraries are good.
But libraries have never been particularly popular or profitable. Have you ever seen lines of people waiting to get into the Library of Congress? No. And neither have I. Libraries are provided as a public service and typically have public funding. That’s because private companies don’t make money from libraries. This was true of paper-based libraries. It’s also true of web-based libraries.
Google’s business differs from its mission
Fortunately for Google, its core business doesn’t depend on its mission. Its business depends on helping us find stuff at lightning speed, at the very moment when we want it, without distractions or intrusive advertising. It is clean. It is neat. It is elegant. It fits our lives as if it had always been there.
We can use Google’s search tool to find stuff without having the slightest interest in whether the world’s information is organized or not. All we care about is whether we can find the thing we are looking for and find it now. Google’s search business, which provides the bulk of its earnings, is in the finding business, not the library business.
So Google’s mission statement hasn’t caused a problem—yet—for its core business. Where it causes a problem is when its people come to think of: what next?
Google Health
Let’s take Google Health.
Google Health is a personal health record service. The service allows users to volunteer their health records – either manually or by logging into their accounts at partnered health services providers – into the Google Health system, thereby merging potentially separate health records into one centralized Google Health profile. Google Health is free to use for consumers and contains no advertising.
The obvious need for Google Health
Google Health responds to the pressing need for personal health records in an electronic form. Thus, there are today over 13,000 different drugs being sold in the US, with a nearly infinite number of possible combinations of diseases, providers and treatments. Predicting and monitoring patients for adverse interactions has scaled beyond the capacity of the human mind. Health services are being provided by an increasingly fragmented set of service providers. The need for comprehensive electronic information on each patient is obvious, as paper-based approaches are incredibly expensive and inefficient.
So in some ways, Google Health is building an essential element of an electronic health record system, which everyone agrees is needed. Yet on June 24, 2011, Google announced that it was retiring the product because it “didn’t catch on the way we would have hoped,” thus leaving the field open to its rival, Microsoft’s [MSFT] HealthVault. Why?
Google Health generated little customer delight
The primary reason is that Google Health was constructed with a library mindset: let’s help people assemble their health information. Those who responded to Google’s offering were those who had a fetish for assembling their own health record. For the average citizen, putting in a lot of work assembling health information was a lot of trouble for uncertain gain at some time in the future. Would the health record ever be useful? Who could say? Is it any surprise that few people took up the offer?
Let’s get back to business basics. In order to build any new business, you have to delight people by providing them with unexpected additional value or by removing some current problem from their lives. Google Health did neither. It was focused on assembling information, not on enabling users to do anything useful. In other words, Google Health was a faithful examplar of the Google mission statement, and hence something that would never make money.
What Google Health needed to succeed
What Google Health needed to succeed was functionality that could delight its users in the here and now, not some time in the future. It needed to do something for users that they couldn’t otherwise get done so easily and conveniently. What could that be?
Health commentator Fred Trotter believes that the answer is dead simple. Google Health needed to provide healthcare services.
The two most widely used and successful personal health deployments in the country are the Kaiser Permanente and the Veteran’s Administratio My Healthevet. Why? You can get a message to your doctor through them, and receive replies back. They are a component of your actual healthcare. You do not have to type data into them, its just there. If you want to schedule an appointment or view your lab results you can do that. If you want to renew a prescription, the personal health record can help. In short, the personal health record is a workhorse in your actual healthcare process.
In this way, the system is not just a collection of information. It’s a way of getting health care provided.
Whether Google would have had the business smarts and the health care expertise to put together such a system is an open question. What is clear is that setting out to build a giant library of health care records was a business loser from the outset.
Google’s PowerMeter is the same story
Similarly, Google’s PowerMeter offered a way for people to assemble all the information about their use of energy, so that they could discover new ways to conserve energy. Users had to input a lot of data into the system so that they could decide what if anything to do. Not surprisingly, the only people who subscribed to the system were energy-conservation enthusiasts. The system didn’t add value to the average citizen. It didn’t solve any obvious problem that average user saw as a problem. The system assembled information. It didn’t enable a user to do anything useful. It was a business failure from the outset, because it accurately reflected the Google mission.
source: forbes.com
please give me comments thanks
Posted in: 
0 comments:
Post a Comment