You can’t win a fist fight with an 800lb gorilla! …or can you?
Our 800lb gorilla of choice is the all powerful, ever present, search titan and collector of all your web activity: Google. One would expect that when Google sets its sights on your specific market that you might as well shut shop and move to Florida. In recent times however, the “little guy” has been holding his own against the behemoth.
Two recent product launches serve as the fuel for my POV: Google+ burst on to the social media scene as the hottest game in town and inciting talk of a mass exodus from Facebook and taking over as the social network of choice. This to my knowledge has not happened. Rather Facebook is bigger and stronger than ever (albeit $1B lighter thanks to Instagram *snicker*) and G+ has all but been relegated to obscurity alongside its sister Google Buzz.
The most recent launch to set the interweb ablaze is the touted “Dropbox killer” Google Drive. Beefing up/replacing Google Docs (depending on your opinion) they’ve set about to conquer the cloud synching world, thereby rendering irrelevant the incumbents Dropbox, Box, and SugarSync. After the initial collective gasp, it seems (to me at least) that there is sufficient push back from current cloud sync app users that the anticipated mass exodus will not come to light. This is due to comparisons in ease of use, difficulty of migrating files to the newcomer, and the necessary degree of buy in from the market given that many users use these tools to collaborate with others who would also need to migrate their data as well.
So the question is why is Google with its power, brand strength, money, expertise, and product arsenal not dominating every market segment that it takes a fancy to? Are they overstretched? Are their products not good enough or innovative enough? Or is Google being perceived to be outside of their realm of expertise?
http://www.awebforeveryone.com/2012/04/25/say-hello-to-googles-drive/
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