Today, Google released the Themes feature to Gmail. While my Gmail account was not in the first batch of releases, as I learned from Tim this morning to my shegrin, I still love this sweet feature.
I am a huge fan of Google, for several reasons. My main reason for being such a fan is because of the way they run their business.
1. Google has their eyes on the horizon.
While Google started as an advertising company, and still is for the most part. They are not just sticking to one thing and thus painting themselves into a corner. They are constantly branching out and developing other areas of specificity that makes them not only unique, but powerful. They are, in a sense, diversifying their long term business model.
2. Google doesn’t wait until their software is perfect before releasing it.
I wasn’t a very early adopter of Gmail, but Tim tells me that the first release of Gmail didn’t even support attachments. But by continually improving on their product iteratively, we now have Google Talk (or Gchat), and Google Calendar integrated into Gmail. While I’m on the subject, I love gmail.
3. Google doesn’t settle for “good enough”.
While the face of google.com hasn’t changed much over the years, the functionality of all of google’s products have become increasingly more robust and efficient. Take for example, igoogle (google’s personalized home page). It first offered the ability to customize the page, then add RSS feeds. Igoogle now has an RSS Reader built in. A tab to the left has your feed links. You click to expand it and read all of the recent posts from that feed. Yet another significant improvement from the previous version.
4. Google provides awesome gadgets
Even President Bush likes using “the google”, as he calls it. I can waste some time with google earth, but Google Docs is a terrific way for small offices to work remotely on documents together. Sketch Up, which is a fairly new addition to the Google family provides the ability to build 3D models, and then insert them in the google earth world so that anyone can visit your designs (if you so choose). If you want to see all the programs google offers, go check ’em out. There’s no need for me to describe them all.
In closing, a company that no one had ever heard of when they came on the scene, is now a household name, used in popular culture and movies. No one says, “Yahoo it”, or “That’s what Yahoo is for”. Google has changed the way websites are designed and is deservingly shipped with any version of Firefox you download.
With the addition of Chrome, all we need now is for Google to beef up Andriod and take on Microsoft.
:: You can do it google; I believe in you ::