Google co-founder Sergey Brin says that success will come from simplicity. Nicholas Carr calls simplicity the new spaghetti and tries to consolidate Google’s many, many products into 5 categories (web presence, web office, content sharing, ad platform and search platform) – because 5 is the magic number; Eric Schmidt says that’s as many as most people can remember.
As Brin puts it, “if we continue to develop so many new individual products that are all in their assorted silos, you will have to essentially search for our products before you can even use them… I would rather have a smaller set of products that have a shared set of features.”
This reminded me of my recent visit to 1&1′s website. There are *lots* of features on this chart; I counted to 50 before losing track. That ain’t simplicity! iPowerweb has a similarly long list, as does LunarPages. (LunarPages has a great blog, by the way. I found it about it from Ben Welch-Bolen at ResellerGuide.)
Yes, all of these companies are very successful – but isn’t Google? If Google thinks it’s important to build easier to understand products with more tightly integrated features, might they be on to something?
For instance, many hosting companies have photo albums that don’t integrate with blogs, shopping carts that don’t have similar-looking templates to site builders, web stats software that isn’t set up to track results from SEO and email marketing tools… As an end user, I’d rather have a seamless feature set than another 1000 GB of bandwidth I’ll never use. Wouldn’t you?
Update: Jon Udell from InfoWorld talks about Clayton Christensen-style disruption in his latest blog post. Google’s office apps are collaboratively adept and functionally lame, he says. And Microsoft’s apps are adept and lame in the opposite ways. He cites a reader’s example of Google Docs adoption within her company and among her customers:
“We started using them around the office for convenience and they’ve taken off. We found the version control, collaboration and invite system outweighed the limited feature set. For the most part, they have the very basic functionality covered.”
In other words, convenience outweighs a large feature set. If Google Docs can take on Word and Excel, might the also-simple Google Pages be a contender against your hosting plan?
