Comment by nostrademons
4 days ago
Quality can lead to sales - this was the premise behind the original Google (they never spent a dime on advertising their own product until the Parisian Love commercial [1] came out in 2009, a decade after founding), and a few other tech-heavy startups like Netscape or Stripe. Microsoft certainly didn't spend a billion $ marketing Altair Basic.
The key point to understand is the only effort that matters is that which makes the sale. Business is a series of transactions, and each individual transaction is binary: it either happens or it doesn't. Sometimes, you can make the sale by having a product which is so much better than alternatives that it's a complete no-brainer to use it, and then makes people so excited that they tell all their friends. Sometimes you make the sale by reaching out seven times to a prospect that's initially cold but warms up in the face of your persistence. Sometimes, you make the sale by associating your product with other experiences that your customers want to have, like showing a pretty woman drinking your beer on a beach. Sometimes, you make the sale by offering your product 80% off to people who will switch from competitors and then jacking up the price once they've become dependent on it.
You should know which category your product fits into, and how and why customers will buy it, because that's the only way you can make smart decisions about how to allocate your resources. Investing in engineering quality is pointless if there is no headroom to deliver experiences that will make a customer say "Wow, I need to have that." But if you are sitting on one of those gold mines, capitalizing on it effectively is orders of magnitude more efficient than trying to market a product that doesn't really work.
> Investing in engineering quality is pointless if there is no headroom to deliver experiences that will make a customer say "Wow, I need to have that."
This. Per your example, this is exactly what it was like when most of us first used Google after having used AltaVista for a few years. Or Google Maps after having used MapQuest for a few years. Google invested their resources correctly in building a product that was head and shoulders above the competition.
And yes, if you are planning to sell beer, you are going to need the help of scantily clad women on the beach much more than anything else.
>> Or Google Maps after having used MapQuest for a few years. Google invested their resources correctly in building a product that was head and shoulders above the competition.
Except that they didn't: they bought a company that had been building a product that was head and shoulders above the competition (Where 2 Technologies), then they also bought Keyhole which became Google Earth.
Incidentally they also bought, not built, Youtube .. and Android.
So, yes, they had a good nose for "experiences that will make a customer say "Wow, I need to have that.""
They arguably did do a good job investing their resources but it was mostly in buying, not building.
.. and they are good at marketing :)
Google Maps as it launched was the integration of 3 pre-existing products: KeyHole (John Hanke, provided the satellite imagery), Where 2 (Lars & Jens Rasmussen, was a desktop-based mapping system), and Google Local (internal, PM was Bret Taylor, provided the local business data). Note that both KeyHole and Where 2 were C++ desktop apps; it was rewritten as browser-based Javascript internally. Soon after launch they integrated functionality from ZipDash (traffic data) and Waze (roadside events).
People read that YouTube or Android were acquisitions and don't realize just how much development happened internally, though. Android was a 6-person startup; basically all the code was written post-acquisition. YouTube was a pure-Python application at time of acquisition; they rewrote everything on the Google stack soon afterwards, and that was necessary for it to scale. They were also facing a company-ending lawsuit from Viacom that they needed Google's legal team to fight; the settlement to it hinged on ContentID, which was developed in-house at Google.
> They arguably did do a good job investing their resources but it was mostly in buying, not building.
They did build a large part of those products, Keyhole is just a part of Google earth google maps in general has many more features than that.
For example driving around cars in every country that allowed it to take street photos is really awesome and nobody else does that even today. Google did that, not some company they aquired, they built it.
Android was nothing like the Android today when it was bought. The real purchase was the talent that came with Android and not the product at the time.
YouTube now, well only someone with deep pockets could have made it what it is today(unlimited video uploads and the engineering to support it). It was nothing special.
After all they sell to marketing people...