It’s time to “keynote up” your game Google!
Dear Google, let me introduce myself so you can understand I’m not ranting, I’m not even mad, let’s just say I’m giving an advice to a good friend that I feel has grown with me.
I’m just one of those guys that have followed you since you were “just” a search engine. I, like most, kind of loved your approach of a simple clean search page that just gave good results.
You have grown while I did too and started giving me (and all the people with an internet connection) tons of free services:
- Gmail (WOW 1GB remember?!!!)
- Maps
- Calendar
- Reader (RIP)
- .. and so many others.
You’ve ignored what normally bothered me in every other player. You pointed to performance and tested — everything — even the UI with what I thought was an engineering mindset: A/B testing tiny, incremental changes… and even the infamous 41 different shades of blue for links.
I’d like to think you targeted perfection via science. You gave far less importance to the package than to the content. At that stage of my life I really could identify with that policy. So when you launched Android and a bit later Motorola did this commercial, well let’s say I liked it... A LOT.
Should a phone be pretty?
Should it be a tiara wearing digital clueless beauty pageant queenor
Should it be fast! Racehorse ducked taped to studness of fast!
We say the latter. So we built a phone that DOES.Does rip through the web like circular saw thought a right banana.
Is it a right precious porcelain figurine of a phone?
In truth, no!
It’s not a princess, it’s a robot!
A phone that trades hairdo for can do
I didn’t like it because it was an attack to the iPhone or Apple, but because it attacked what I believed was the status quo of the world which was “beauty above all”. Looking backwards I think it was clearly a rebound to what I saw like an appearances focused world which I thought was very wrong.
It kind of made me think this beauty versus functionality was like the “war” Edison vs Tesla... (and everyone knows who Google cheers for).
Well, as time went by I (and Google as it seems) started to understand that there isn’t a war between the two and beauty isn’t neither a good nor a bad thing by itself. It can be used to serve a purpose: making a product “beautiful” may even mean that it’s really better (I’m looking at you Medium and your obsession with letters :-) ).
So as Larry Page stepped in as CEO (again) a whole lot of things started to change. A lot of what Apple does well started to flow in the Google veins as well.
Something strange and remarkable started happening at Google immediately after Larry Page took full control as CEO in 2011: it started designing good-looking apps.
Great design is not something anybody has traditionally expected from Google. Infamously, the company used to focus on A/B testing tiny, incremental changes like 41 different shades of blue for links instead of trusting its designers to create and execute on an overall vision. The “design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data” led its very first visual designer, Douglas Bowman, to leave in 2009.
(…)
When Page took office, his first directive was clear. “Larry said ‘hey everyone, we’re going to redesign all of our products,’” recalls Jon Wiley, lead designer on Google Search. Wiley and co had just two months to give Google a fresh coat of paint, and to start thinking holistically about how Google as a whole was perceived. “We had a mandate to make this all look good,” Wiley says.
Well you know what happened next. Google started not just being good, but also looking good. (Actually to be fair I think the “revolution” had already started before with Matias Duarte joining Google and Android starting to become pretty, but it needed a CEO to leverage it to the whole company.)
It even went further after Alphabet was announced and a new Google brand was pushed to all the products.
It’s time
Well, I was stubborn some years ago as I described at the beginning of this story when I was defending what I liked to call an “all engineering, no beauty bullshit” and it took me some time to get over my bias. I lagged a little behind Google on that.
Well, I think we need one more thing… if you know what I mean.
And Apple via Steve Jobs is the master at it.
Google has great products, now a great UI/UX… but it really lags behind when it’s showing them.
Come on.. people reading?
There are some good public speakers all right, but most at the keynotes seem unprepared or very uncomfortable on stage. This is very unpleasant for those watching as we feel the jitters, which kind of kills the pleasant experience.
Don’t get me wrong, you have done some AMAZING stuff before. I’ll never forget…
… and it doesn’t even needs to be this kind of awesome, probably most products can’t even do something that would have this kind of wow factor. But it really doesn’t need to be this type of wow factor, Larry Page’s speech was for me the highest point on a Google IO that I have seen so far.
But..the show must Google on
Product announcements and demos are, on today’s world, just another moment of entertainment. They need to make us feel good things, not think about things or even worse: feel bad things.
And it’s not (only) about what you are showing it’s HOW you are showing it. People like theatrical moments, where you get a product out of nowhere, and do magic.
To be perfectly clear I’m nowhere defending bs. The “awesome”, “best ever”, “amazing” keywords still mess with my nerves when I watch an Apple keynote as they are used to exhaustion.
I also definitely don’t think a bad product will be “turned good” by just a good presentation. I didn’t turn to the dark side, but guys, you do an awful lot of AWESOME stuff with your products, but you are failing at making us feel it.
Do you know what? Even Microsoft has its keynote game on
Microsoft with its’ new CEO jumped what seemed 20 years forward on their keynote skills.
I’m hopping you will do it to!
Your move Google.
From a good friend.
