On Thursday, Google held a Google Analyst Day for investors and analysts, and you can download a PDF of the presentation slides. There’s some fascinating stuff in there, including the slide above, which shows how it ranks its various products. Search is the core 70%, with things like Gmail in the supplementary 20% circle.
Things that are non-strategic — often produced because individuals thought they were interesting — are in the outer (10%) circle. Examples include Orkut, Reader, Google Pack, Google Movies and W-Fi. Which is fine. The problem is that the outer 10% are mostly mediocre products badly executed. This has made people like me wonder if Google can actually execute, and whether it has a real strategy or is simply confused. Such wonderings can have a decidedly adverse effect on the image of Google’s core businesses. If Google is serious, it needs to signal the relative importance of these products much more strongly than it does. Or simply stop releasing half-baked products under the Google name.
Eh?
