black · 2006-04-13 19:51

One more thought to distract me from packing…

Why does Google only have one calendar? One email reader?

It’s like the beginning of the mass production revolution – “You can have any color as long as it’s black.” Traditional product companies have learnt you need to diversify the product range, and create different products for differing needs – to the extremes of personalisation and individually different products. Companies that are mass producing one or two products are pretty dead in the water these days.

Yahoo at least has two of some things – notably photos (Flickr and Yahoo Photos). But the difference between the two is unclear. It certainly isn’t demographics, and only slightly psychographic (publicness as default).

The fact we haven’t seen any movement from product to product lines means we’re just at the start of this all. There certainly isn’t the excuse of tooling and factory building that traditional product companies have to overcome.

Update (from Heathrow!):
I forgot to mention last night – maybe we are seeing this start: for example with Joga – Google & Nike’s football social networking service. A SNS is probably not the best place to start with this, though – by definition these sites need volume to be useful. Anyone know how well Joga is doing?

Also note that the use of single-sign-on-of-sorts – a Google account – increases the probability of wading through the sign up process significantly.

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