Short Thoughts

Google is Doomed

Just this past week, Google took the covers off their latest “me too” product, Google Music. The new service purports to allow users to store their entire music library (up to 20,000 songs for free) online for streaming in the cloud, and also purchase new music from the Android Market, all while providing deep(ish) integration with Google+ to share music with your friends. On the surface, it looks like a tremendous offering.

Oh, did I say tremendous? I meant really, really confusing. 

Fractured Branding

The first thing that confused me about Google Music was that, when I clicked on a link in a tweet to visit Coldplay’s Google Music page, the resulting page didn’t have the words “Google Music” on it anywhere. Like, anywhere. It’s 100% Android Market-branded, which I found strange, because I was fairly certain that the Android Market was only for, ya’ know, Android things, like apps. It took a little digging to discover that, oh yes, they are in fact part of the same product, the branding is just divided between the two. Interesting.

So then I decided, “alright, let’s be fair, I can’t criticize this until I create an account and try it out.” The first thing it had me do to get my music into Google Music was download a Google-authored Java app called “Music Manager.” OK, that’s fair, downloading an app makes sense, but why is it called “Music Manager”? Why not, say, “Google Music.app”? Or you know, something to differentiate it from other music management apps in my list of applications.

Google Music, Android Market, Music Manager. Not the most confusing, I suppose, but that’s still three “brands” to keep straight, in a sense. The most confusing part about it is the Android Market, because a) I don’t own any Android devices, and b) it’s an established brand that’s used for something entirely separate, so I don’t understand why I should have to leave the Google Music “umbrella” just to buy more music. Yes Google, I get that you want to continue to solidify the Android Market brand, but by doing that you’re only degrading the experience of your other products. Look at the Apple product ecosystem: yes, technically it’s the same backend that powers all content you purchase from Apple, but it’s called the iTunes Store for music, movies, and TV shows; the App Store for apps; the iBookstore for books; and so on. Each type of content gets its own dedicated store, which provides a better, more deeply-integrated experience at the small cost of the word “iTunes” not being plastered everywhere. Newsflash: Android is popular. You don’t need to shove its name down our throats.

Fractured Experience

Alright, so you use Google Music to play and organize your music, Music Manager to upload it, and Android Market to buy new music. Think I’ve got that under control. Let’s try it out.

I started by uploading a selection of music from my Mac into the Google Music system using Music Manager. That at least made it clear why Music Manager isn’t just called Google Music: the app itself does nothing but upload music. Of course, that makes sense — Google could make a native app for music playback, but that just isn’t their thing. It’s all about the cloud and whatnot. Fair enough, stick to what you like.

Thus, I then headed over to Safari to listen to some of the music I’d uploaded. Nothing life-changing, but it’s an entirely pleasant convenience, I love the idea of being able to access my music library from anywhere. I supposed “it’s only proper, then, that I christen my library with a bit of new music to celebrate the occasion,” so I clicked on the “Shop” button and was redirected to the Android Market.

I loaded up my cart with a few songs, and clicked “Buy.” Oh. I have to sign-in again? And I don’t mean just confirm my password like in iTunes, I mean my Android Market and Google Music accounts can actually be separate. Well then, at least the branding accurately reflects the experience.

So now that I’m done with all that, I can probably head over to Google Music in Safari on my iPhone to listen to music. Oh, I can’t? Mobile devices get a native app? OK, that’s reasonable. Oh, but there’s no iOS app available yet? OK, then. Really not doing a great job at taking on iTunes then, are we? Or Spotify, for that matter.

Necessary Digression: The Cloud

It’s no secret that I think that Google gets “the cloud” wrong, and it just boggles my mind because there are probably very few other companies in the world with the same potential to get it unreservedly perfect.

Google is a proponent — nay, the veritable poster child — for the idea that someday in the future, everyone’s day-to-day computing experience will take place inside a web browser. They believe that people don’t want or need native apps, and that the web is more than good enough. They envision a world where people open Google Chrome at the start of the day, and never touch another application, using web apps for all of their computing needs. And they’re so very wrong.

In my opinion, Google makes the mistake of confusing the technologies with the interaction model. Web technologies like HTML5 are phenomenal, and the idea of leveraging the cloud to allow users to have access to their content wherever they are is a solid, and I dare say inevitable, vision. But just because we access websites in the web browser doesn’t mean that the web browser is the only place we can take advantage of web technologies.

And what is a web browser, really? It’s a native app. A very generic, very flexible native app. If you look at it as Google will have you believe, it’s kind of a meta-app in a way, a platform for running other apps. But my question to that is, why? Yes, it’s entirely possible, but since when has an added layer of abstraction between you and a particular service been a good thing? Why would you voluntarily take a loan from a middle-man? Why would you buy food being resold through a third-party when you have the option of buying it directly from the source?

Web apps are a fantastic thing of convenience: they’re a great way to provide a service to a large number of users without having to worry much about what kind of device they may be using to access your product. That’s the only real problem they’re called on to solve, though — web apps are not, despite popular belief, the panacea to having your documents with you wherever you go. Except for convenience (by which I mean convenience of the software engineers, which is the worst kind of convenience to indulge), there is no reason at all that makes web apps more suited to the “roaming user” than native apps. In my opinion, iCloud is a prime example: each of iCloud’s supported services provides a web app for user convenience, but the primary method of interacting with iCloud services is through natives apps built-in to devices, like Mail, iCal, Address Book, and so on. iCloud treats the cloud as an information conduit, not a workspace. It leverages the cloud to provide an enhanced user experience, not to pursue an ideological agenda, and not to solve a problem that no one actually has.

Never build a solution until you actually understand the problem. No one’s asking for there to be a web app to replace all of their native apps, they’re asking for a way to use their existing apps no matter where they may happen to be, without having to save their data to a flash drive (or equivalent). Web apps are an answer to that problem, but they’re not the only one, and they’re sure as hell not the best one.

On Integration

Perhaps the biggest problem with Google’s attitude toward the cloud is that it very much eschews the idea of platform integration. I know I’m a fanboy, but I’d like to submit, for your approval, the case study of Apple as a champion of integration.

When you’re listening to music in iTunes — be it on your Mac, or your iPhone, or anything else really — you’re afforded a lot of conveniences. You can use the media keys on your keyboard to pause and skip tracks. You can use AirPlay to play your music through other speakers. You can sync with your iPhone or iPod, even wirelessly.

You can’t do any of those things with a web app. Some would argue that the solution is to add APIs to the web browser that enable that interaction, and to a degree that’s fine, but that’s a very dangerous road that leads to nothing but heartache. Bloating the web browser with the technological equivalent of pork-barrel legislation does the ecosystem more harm than good over time. The solution is not to pervert the web browser into doing things it was never intended to do, but rather to start with a web browser and trim down the features you don’t need (read: practically all of them), and then build your own native client from there. When software and hardware are designed to work together, harmony ensues. It’s why the Mac, and the iPhone, and a vast majority of Apple products are so great, and why an app designed to run inside another app can never quite obtain the same level of creature comfort.

Conclusion

Let me be perfectly clear: with regards to Google Music, I’m nitpicking. Hardcore. But that’s the point.

It’s not like Google Music is a bad offering, it’s absolutely not. It’s a pretty darn cool service. It’s not even that the drawbacks are big enough to make me not want to use it, they pretty much all boil down to instances of “fair enough” or “that mostly makes sense” or “sure, I can live with that.” But people don’t say those things about great products.

When I say “Google is doomed,” I do not mean they are doomed to fail — that would just be silly. No, Google will always excel at their bread-and-butter, their search, their advertising, even Gmail. Even their less intoxicating products like Google Docs and now Google Music are pretty darn good. But Google is doomed: they’re doomed to mediocrity, to produce one “pretty darn good” product after another, and never achieve anything great from anything more than a purely academic standpoint. And it’s all because they just don’t get user experience.