Google assimilation
Soon after the launch of Buzz, a Newsweek journalist called Dan Lyons, perhaps better known as the blogger Fake Steve Jobs, wrote a piece questioning why we need yet another social networking service. We already have Facebook, Twitter and countless other ways of interacting with our ‘friends', and he resented feeling compelled to try another.
What all three of these product launches have in common is the mobile Internet land-grab, which is a long game. Google and Apple, as well as a hell of a lot of other companies like Intel and NVIDIA, see a lot of their future growth coming from selling products and services to people who access the web on the move. Right now, social networking is considered to be one of the main reasons people go online from mobile devices.
The reason for this is that everyone can get their head around things like Facebook. My mum, dad and wife all have accounts. It's not designed for geeks or tech journalists, it's designed for average Joes. This level or mass market acceptance has certainly been achieved by Google, with its search and Gmail products, and Apple, with the iPod and iPhone. So both companies are trying to transfer this success onto new products and stay ahead of the chasing pack.
To be honest, I'm still not sure exactly what the point of the Nexus One is. As a piece of hardware, there doesn't seem to be too much to distinguish it from, say, the HTC HD2. Google probably intends it as a guinea-pig device to not only beta-test the latest versions of Android and show-off its capabilities. Also it wants to experiment with creating a new sales channel, cutting out the operators.
The point of Buzz seems like an attempt to break the stranglehold of Facebook and Twitter on social networking. "Buzz exists because Google feels threatened by Twitter and Facebook and wants to kill them," opined Lyons. "Google has become what Microsoft used to be-the Borg, the company that gobbles up ideas from smaller rivals and cranks out lame imitations in an attempt to put the little guys out of business."
In short, it's something Google had to do, and the initial response of the the tech press and early adopters is beside the point. In the mobile Internet land-grab, social networking is a key battleground and Google's not about to just be a bystander.