The revelation that Buzz was produced by a team of 30 engineers and one product person, who only ever meet to give product demos, explains much about that launch.
I'm not a mindless Google-basher. They have many brilliant products. But Buzz was a pointless product that looked terrible and broke user expectations, produced entirely on a "because the data would be fun to have" basis -- something you'd expect from engineers who aren't thinking about the customer.
Engineers can build great, customer-focussed products (heck, that's the idea behind most of YCombinator). But this group did not.
Comments
The revelation that Buzz was produced by a team of 30 engineers and one product person, who only ever meet to give product demos, explains much about that launch.
I'm not a mindless Google-basher. They have many brilliant products. But Buzz was a pointless product that looked terrible and broke user expectations, produced entirely on a "because the data would be fun to have" basis -- something you'd expect from engineers who aren't thinking about the customer.
Engineers can build great, customer-focussed products (heck, that's the idea behind most of YCombinator). But this group did not.