Friday, June 30, 2006

Google’s Marissa Mayer on Success Metrics and More

BusinessWeek has an interesting interview with Google’s Marrissa Mayer:

• Marissa says Google throws out many products and doesn’t expect every one of those to become a success; instead, they’ll approach this in terms of success rates, so if one or two of five releases take off, that’s good.
• Marissa argues if Gmail would be open for everyone as opposed to be invite-only, it’d be 10 times as large as it is now – the size of Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. (I’m not sure... Gmail being scarce added a lot to its “hotness” during launch.)
• To keep the Google homepage uncluttered and yet allow easy access to Google’s full range of products, Google is trying to merge tools where it makes sense. For example, instead of linking to Google blog search or Google Finance straight from the homepage, it’d make more sense to integrate those into Google News, as that’s a place where people look for news already.
• Marissa finds that people in general over-estimate the short term, and under-estimate the long term. For example, Google Spreadsheets is certainly no Excel killer today, but it might mature in the long term.
• She says over 100,000 people finished the Da Vinci Code puzzles... including Sergey Brin, who was disqualified though being a Google employee.

[Via Slashdot.]

Google’s Marissa Mayer on ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (14)

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