Sunday, November 6, 2011

The week Google really 'messed up'

A harsh report from CNN Tech this week announced that Google has once again produced "another disaster" with its releasing of the Gmail app for iOS. The company posted "The iOS app we launched today contained a bug with notifications. We have pulled the app to fix the problem. Sorry we messed up." This is not very comforting to see from one of the largest internet technology companies. The real problem is that this is just one of a long list of things that Google has failed to produce properly. Only two weeks prior, an update to Google Reader was produced and pulled within the same hour. These recent botches are digging at Google's image as an innovative company which brings into question the elasticity of its customers. If Google keeps releasing disappointing products, people may stop being excited about the company as a whole. How long will costumers trust Google and its products? MG Siegler, a tech pundit, wrote that "They release something, and I no longer have any faith that it's going to be any good." He went on to explain that Google does not have the reputation and consumer inelasticity as companies like Apple has because of the trustworthiness, or lack there of, in their products. Recently, Google has been marked by its attempt at Google+ and Google Latitude, which have both been seen as miserable efforts to compete with Facebook. Google is trying to create substitutes for popular products but it is backfiring on them because of the elasticity of their products. Customers don't care about the Google name on the product, if the price keeps going up on the products that don't work properly, consumers will look for other options. Siegler continued with, "When you release sub-par products, you look sub-par yourself. Customers don't care what platform it's on, and don't care what politics are going on behind the scenes at the company. If you release s---, you look like s---. It's much better to release nothing at all." At the moment, it is in one's self-interest to stay away from Google products until they can prove themselves to put out trustworthy products at reasonable prices, but until then, customers demand for Google products will remain very elastic.

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