I’m not the type to toot my own horn all that often but sometimes it can be fun. Like when I make a prediction about the future business development path …
… of the most popular search brand ever. I’m talking about Google of course.
Back in October of last year I put up a post about Google transforming itself into a portal and today I find out via Danny that Google is indeed launching a portal. It’s not really that shocking, especially with their recent acquisitions and increased revenue from multiple divisions. I’ve also compared the past and present business units of operations Google and Yahoo have and how similar they are. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Google’s business plans aren’t all that secretive. If you want to find out what they’re about to do next just look at the timeline of Yahoo and throw in elements of social networking and you’ve got Google’s secret recipe for busdev.
Offering a portal type service is a logical step for them and the timing is perfect. I mean if you simply use gmail and google maps on a regular basis then you’re already tired of having to put in the same driving destination over and over cause it doesn’t remember it and you want to be able to manage all of your Google account info in a single place. Additionally, now you can slide out of your MyYahoo app and use Google’s search results and still have several of the same features you have over in MyYahoo like stocks, news and weather.
The only downside I see right now is that the elegantly robust user interface is already looking cluttered even though they’re using images sparingly. However, since I always felt like Yahoo’s portal gave me way too many options and made me remove too much garbage in order to actually end up with only the information I wanted… I find my new Google portal a breath of fresh air. I already customized my iGoogle… but I’m wondering when I’ll be able to replace bloglines with my iGoogle homepage. That will be a very cool day indeed.
Successful execution of an internet business plan involves many things. The most elements are timing and delivery and I think Google has done a good job on both fronts with the launch of their new portal app.
As I was finishing up this post I tried accessing one of the unread emails in my GMail account from the iGoogle page and I got a javascript error saying GMail was temporarily unavailable and then the same message appeared on my iGoogle homepage. But when I accessed GMail directly from another browser tab in Firefox it worked fine… hmmm, is this yet another beta?
Jason Dowdell is a technology entrepreneur and operates the Marketing Shift blog.
