Google is winning because it works. People like things that “just work”.
Let’s look at home computers. They have become more complicated and error prone. This has to do with Viruses, half-baked software, Microsoft engineering, and too many options on hardware. Users get frustrated when their IT friend says, “Just buy a new PC from Best Buy”. The answer is usually upgrade the hardware, wipe the drive, put better virus software on…. But the answer to “just make it work” is get a new PC. Wonder why a lot of people are trying the Mac?
How about Google? What “just works”? For an experiment I tried the Yahoo search bar in my browser first for two weeks. After a few searches I usually reverted to Google, and got what I wanted on the first page of results. Today I’m switching my default search bar back to Google. Remember “just works”? Try putting “buy Mark lunch next Friday” in your Google calendar. Yes, it will figure it out. Google Calendar “Just works”.
Rather than wrangling over features and functionality I’ve started just asking the question “Does it just work”?
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4 users responded in this post
I tried googling it, and it said ”ask again later.”
Great post… I completely concur.. Neither Apple nor Microsoft do very well in this regard. The Google example you gave is a great example… Their ability to do calculator in the toolbar in sentence form rocks as well…
OTOH, they screwed up the Google toolbar by taking away the search-within-page buttons consisting of your search terms…
The software you are using for this blog seems a bit flaky… my comment is here, but the home page still says “no comments”… Some of the buttons are showing up correctly either; specifically the “post my comment” button just below this text box.
The software is fine, the blog comments are moderated due to spamming. I got tired of ads for ED showing up on my blog.
Looks like my custom theme has a broken link for that button, no biggie to fix that.
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