Google Has Gone Certifiably Nuts

One of the earmarks of a poorly managed business is the inability to focus on core competencies and improve the product, its delivery, and the efficiency of the business. It's like a guy who runs a lawn mower-sharpening business who decides to sell junk jewelry on the side or moose heads on eBay because he saw someone else do it and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

This is Google.

I was under the impression that when Larry Page came to power, Google would re-focus and end all its experiments. But it has gotten worse.

Microsoft, Yahoo, and others also suffer from the malady of veering off-course. Consider how much of the shareholder money has been squandered.

These particular companies have to be analyzed differently from a company such as Amazon, which often appears to be involved in lame ideas. However, Amazon's core competency is to sell stuff through its system in any way possible. All its offbeat ideas are actually part of a grand scheme that makes sense.

For example, why does Amazon sell the Kindle? It's in the book business and Kindles deliver the next generation of books. Same with the Fire phone. It's designed for show-rooming: to identify products in the store with or without a bar code and tell you what you should be paying for it...and if the product you are about to buy might be cheaper at Amazon. At the same time, the phone does market research for Amazon by telling the company what people are interested in buying. (Or it would, if anyone bought a Fire Phone.)

With Google, there is no such grand unification theory. It's just scattershot nonsense that has very little to do with its core money-making businesses: Internet search and online advertising.

The company's effort to develop a self-driving car are noble, but what does it have to do with anything? Street View and Google Maps can be justified because you can shoehorn some relationship to search. Investors should be okay with that, but not the car.

Even worse is Google's desire to throw money away by competing with Amazon by selling stuff. This is pure insanity.

It began a couple of years ago with the development and rollout of Google Express, which is almost the same idea as the long defunct Kozmo.com and Webvan, classic dotcom bust companies. Before that, Google tried to sell a Groupon type service called Google Offers and in the process perhaps push Google Wallet and Google Checkout.

With the latter two products, there was the belief that the company could compete with PayPal, but Google was apparently clueless about what PayPal actually does.

And let's not forget the confusing Google+, which was intended to crush Facebook. What a laugh.

Now we have the culmination of many of these concepts with a souvenir shop called the Google Merchandise Store selling every sort of Google-branded nonsense imaginable, including a $50 meat "branding iron" that will imprint the Android robot image on a hamburger or steak.

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All the while—and I've said this before—Google's core business and cash-cow search languishes. I do not mean it is not making money. It does make money. But it needs improvement.

Google does have a few initiatives designed to help search. Most people would agree that the Google translate mechanism is very useful for international searches, but it is not a best-of-breed translator. In fact, it is mostly mediocre. The company should put more effort into it.

For a fascinating list of cool but more-often wacky and off-topic products from Google, go to the "List of Google Products" wiki page. As a warning, you will waste the better part of a month examining these initiatives and programs. How many will still be around next year or in a decade remains to be seen.

There are, or will be, some killer applications amongst this list. You will never have heard of the product and you'll discover that no matter how cool it is, nobody is using it. You'll fall in love, then Google will cancel it in much the way Yahoo tends to do with cool, unknown products.

That process and the irresponsibility of the practice invites another column. For now let's just say this company is nuts.