Learning from Google's Success

Almost everybody today will say yes if you asked him whether he knows Google or not. Yes, Google now may be the most popular internet-related-company. Most people use search engine to find what they need on the internet. And I dare say that the most widely used search engine today is Google Search Engine. As a consequence, many people set Google Search Engine as homepage on their internet browser. It means that Google Search Engine always appears first anytime the people open Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, or Chrome.
Starting with its successful search engine, Google has been extending its products. Certainly some of them succeed and some others fail. Google Earth, Blogger, and Gmail are some of the successful products. On the other hand, I think Google Talk can not replace the popularity of Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger. Google Talk fails.
Google Earth becomes the most popular map service. Although it gives one-week-ago map, many people really like it because the map is presented as aerial photograph. It's real. We even can make it larger using zoom. Really fantastic!
Blogger is also one of the most popular free blogging service. Blogger is now competing with Wordpress, another popular free blogging service. Although some people said that Wordpress has more features than Blogger, we all know that Wordpress free blogging does not support adsense. Luckily, Blogger fully supports adsense. For this reason, many people blogging for money purpose prefer Blogger to Wordpress.

Gmail is now the biggest competitor to Yahoo Mail. To beat Yahoo Mail that was born earlier, Gmail started offering unlimited size for its email service, without any payment. One hundred percent free of charge. What a surprising attack against Yahoo Mail. Not to be beaten by GMail, Yahoo Mail finally increased their free-email size. Beyond size, many people prefer GMail because it can block spams much better. However, many people still use free Yahoo Mail because they don't want to make any new email account.
Google Talk, unfortunately, can not beat other instant messaging services. Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger are still the most popular instant messaging until today. Google Talk is not as lucky as Google Search Engine, Google Earth, Blogger, and Gmail. 
Now what can we learn from Google's success story explained briefly above? First of all, it's focus. Before owning Google Earth, Blogger, and Gmail, Google was only focusing on search engine. As we all know, some years ago Yahoo was the most popular search engine. People used it to find anything on the web. But today, people use Google to find anything the need on the web. Google succeeded to beat Yahoo because they focus on one thing: search engine. After Google was established with its search engine, they begin making some other products. 
The second thing we can learn from Google is more attention to function and content. Look at Google Search Engine. Do you find any sophisticated graphics there? Not at all. It's not more than a small box in which we type expressions to find something on the web. But it's not a usual small box. It's a magic small box that many people become addicted to it. It's about function, not about appearance. Yet today Google Search Engine occasionally modifies its logo, based on important dates such as christmas, new year, popular people's birthday, etc.
These are the two things we can learn from Google's success story. Do you have another thing to learn from them?