Is Google out of touch?

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the Google Gadgets events which was held in association with Quirk. For those of you who were there I’m sure you can agree that the farm they held the event on was pretty odd and more importantly the directions were horrendous. I wish Google would create some sort of mapping software that would allow people to give directions in an easier manner. I guess they could call it something clever like say… “Google Maps”.

So anyway, jokes aside, Quirk head honcho Rob Stokes gave us all a talk on the relevance of Gadgets or as I call them Widgets. Rob is an amazing speaker, he really engaged the audience and got his point across. His description of why we all need to use Gadgets and how to make them successful was fascinating and highly entertaining. His main punt was essentially iGoogle as the Gadgets you get for that portal can be used in the Mac OSX Dashboard as well as the Windows Vista sidebar.

While I’m personally not sold on Gadgets just quite yet I can understand the reasoning for some companies. For those of you not sure what I’m talking about, Gadgets are basically “mini-applications” that can reside on your computer or a webpage and offer very specific information. An example would be the iGoogle site where you have your traditional search options but also can get the weather, news, exchange rates and really anything your heart desires or some programmer can dream up. As I say, I’m not sure the usefulness as I’m not sure how to monetise these Gadgets yet but there is certainly room for niche value added services.

My topic though “Is Google out of touch?” so I think it’s important I answer this question. Basically for the last thirty minutes of his presentation, Rob asked each table to provide a Gadget they thought would be good. This “competition” was adjudicated by the Marketing Manager of Google South Africa, a French lady whose name I cannot remember now. Her choices as the winner of the competition was a TV guide Gadget that allowed you to track you favourite TV shows as well as a stock tracking Gadget which would allow you to follow your stock picks.

You might be thinking that these are good ideas because they actually are! The issue though is that they’ve already been done. Any Mac/Vista user will tell you that the stock Gadget is included by default and as far as I know there is a TV tracker Gadget out there as well.

This leads me to believe that at the very least the marketing lady was out of touch with the future. If you’re having a conference about being on the forefront of a movement then possibly you should be on the forefront? I don’t think Google is necessarily out of touch but the whole concept of Gadgets and iGoogle is seriously lacking in South Africa.

All in all, an interesting evening with a free Google t-shirt and decent food. As I’ve said before, Rob Stokes was great and hopefully someone will put create something amazing out of Gadgets.

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