Slows innovation, improves integration

The shift is a major departure from Google8217;s prior strategy of launching new services rapid-fire, and it highlights the eight-year-old company8217;s struggle to stay focused during rapid growth.

In another sign of Google Inc8217;s growth from start-up to serious business, the company8217;s top executives have said they had begun telling engineers to stop launching so many new services and to instead focus on making existing ones work together better. The shift is a major departure from Google8217;s prior strategy of launching new services rapid-fire, and it highlights the eight-year-old company8217;s struggle to stay focused during rapid growth.

Co-founder Sergey Brin is leading a companywide initiative called 8220;Features, not products.8217;8217; He said the campaign started this summer when Google executives realised the myriad of product releases was confusing users. 8220;It8217;s worse than that,8217;8217; said Brin, Google8217;s president of technology. 8220;It8217;s that I was getting lost in the sheer volume of the products that we were releasing.8217;8217;

More than 50 products, in various stages of development, are available on Google8217;s websites. There are so many that the company has collected 35 on a site called 8220;More Google products8217;8217;, which includes digital maps, instant messaging software, programs that speed up Web surfing 8212; and even a search engine for mail-order catalogues.

Analysts said Google was fighting a problem that had historically plagued technology giants, many of which became so enamoured with innovating that they forgot to create products people would really use. 8220;They created a bunch of crap that they have no idea what to do with,8217;8217; Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, said of Google.

Earlier this year, Google said its internal audits had discovered that the company had been spending too much time on new services to the detriment of its core search engine.

The initiative8217;s primary goal is to make Google products easier to use, especially by packaging disparate products. For example, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications.

Flush with cash following its initial public offering two years ago, Google scooped up hundreds of software engineers and began releasing new services at a dizzying pace. 8220;The result occurred precisely because we told these incredible engineering teams to run as fast as possible to solve new problems,8217;8217; Schmidt said. 8220;But then that created this other problem.8217;8217;

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The company does not plan to tell engineers to halt all new products, Google said, nor does it plan to kill little-used services.

Rather, the effort is focused on future development. After launching 8220;Features, not products8217;8217; this summer, Schmidt said, Google cancelled several new services in development and instructed their creators to instead make features of other products.

8220;That is a big change in the way we run the company,8217;8217; Schmidt said, describing Google8217;s previous attitude as: 8220;Just get this stuff built and get it out 8212; don8217;t worry about the integration.8217;8217;

8212;Chris Gaither / Los Angeles Times