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Went Hot: September 7, 2008 - 9:08 am
Posted By: NickWilsdon 88 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://profy.com)
Category: Google Other
17 Comments
Went Hot: September 7, 2008 - 9:08 am
Posted By: NickWilsdon 88 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://profy.com)
Category: Google Other
17 Comments
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Comments
This taught me a lesson about promoting features. I'd always pushed the ones that differentiated the product from the others in the market, the unique selling point (USP). Google's marketing of Chrome shows that you can successfully promote existing marketplace features as "new" or "solutions".
If you do it well enough, you'll even get other blogs and publishers to amplify the myth that you created these features in the first place.
For example, I had no idea that containing processes within a single tab was already available in IE8 ("Tab Isolation") - and has been since the first beta. I was under the impression that Google brought this new to the market. In fact I've seen several posts which also say this directly.
For example: 10 Key Features That Differentiate Google's Chrome From Firefox & IE
Of course it also shows that most of the people writing about Chrome at the moment either don't use IE/Safari or are unaware of the features these browsers already have. But that's a lesson in marketing in itself isn't it.
"But that's a lesson in marketing in itself isn't it. "
Well, most of those articles were published 2 hours after Chrome was released :)
@Halfdeck
Absolutely, but why hadn't the IE team managed to convey widely that these features are on their new browser? If they already had matching technology in most of these cases, why didn't the majority of tech reviewers know this.
This has been a great display of marketing from the Google team but also shows the holes in the efforts from MS. The browser war will be fought as much on marketing as actual features.
The IE8 development team has been posting regularly on the IE blog detailing all of the new features. One of the first things I thought when I was reading about Chrome's "new" features was that IE8 already had most of them.
I almost dephunn it just for revenge, but my hand started shaking and hit the sphinn button by mistake ;)
@Purposeinc
LOL - no more Mr. Nice Klein eh? We'll have to have it out at PubCon - last person to leave the bar looses ;)
I guess everyone misses the point that whether the other browsers had these features or not, Chrome was engineered from the ground up without all the legacy bloat and constraints the other products had.
Let's shred the fluff and do 10 Myths about 10 Chrome Myths:
Myth 1: Separate threads: Chrome made a big splash about it before the general public knew about the MSIE 8 feature, so it's a marketing win. Besides, I've been a Windows Developer for a long time and we developed lots of multi-threaded multi-window or tabbed applications and this technique is ages old, something MS should be embarassed it took their engineers this long to accomplish.
Myth 2: Javascript virtual machine: Chrome already delivered what Firefox promised. How is that a myth about Chrome, sniff test failure...
Myth 3: Private Browsing: this was barely known about MSIE 8, almost sounded like an after thought the way I read it and Chrome already has it in the field being tested by millions. Another marketing win.
Myth 4: Privacy is already a myth, Google toolbar, AdSense, Firefox Anti-Phish and a whole bunch of stuff feed your data to Google so move along and stop beating a dead horse.
Myth 5: Anti-Phish? Google has been supplying anti-phish data to Firefox 2 for quite some time and came out with it about the same time as MSIE, so this is a silly comparison. Funny, you don't even mention that feature Google feeds data too in Firefox, convenient eh?
Myth 6-9: nit picking noise to fill a list of 10 items, yawn
Myth 10: Standards - it's built using the Safari rendering engine so how can it render pages worse then Safari unless there is a difference between the Mac and Windows version of the Safari code and nobody says anything about that.
What chrome has done is the same thing MS has been doing for years, you pre-emptively announce something new or launch a beta that isn't quite ready to create lots of FUD in the marketplace. Good for your stockholders, bad for your competitors.
NOW HERE'S A FACT JACK:
Microsoft has been making noise from day one when they went to war with Netscape to be the dominant browser that the browser was part of the operating system.
OK, if it's part of the OS then when did Chome make this HUGE minor improvement where you can make shortcuts to web-based applications?
If the browser was, as MS always claimed, part of the OS, then shouldn't you have always been able to make shortcuts?
Funny people overlook this major slap across MS's face and a massive improvement on bookmarks.
No longer do you need to go into the browser to launch Gmail, you simply click on Gmail in your task bar, on in your start menu, or on your desktop and launch it directly like any other application.
This IMO was the coolest damn thing they did in Chrome.
IncrediBILL,
Those were very informative Myths. Thank you.
"OK, if it's part of the OS then when did Chome make this HUGE minor improvement where you can make shortcuts to web-based applications?"
You can make desktop shortcuts to any URL you want from any browser you want (including IE) and have been able to for a long time. The only difference is that the instance of Chrome used for the shortcuts doesn't have any navigational UI. When you click that shortcut to go to Gmail, all it is doing is opening up Chrome anyways, just as if you had clicked on a shortcut to gmail created from IE or Firefox.
All the Chrome shortcuts do is point to chrome.exe and tack on an "app=whatever URL" switch, for instance: chrome.exe -app=http://sphinn.com/story/70853.
Try it, just open up a command prompt and run "%userprofile%AppDataLocalGoogleChromeApplicationchrome.exe -app=http://sphinn.com".
Hardly a groundbreaking new feature.
I know how it works, that wasn't the point.
It's the presentation and ease of use for the average non-tech type that makes it different.
I said the integration was ground breaking because MS made all the noise about the browser being integrated into the OS yet it took Chrome to implement it as an easy to use feature.
So, we have another browser for which we have to optimize our pages for?
Sounds not so great. :(
I don't know but I still love and enjoy using Chrome ^^
I refuse to read yet another top ten list because most top ten lists are devoid of original thought and are only aggregating what's been said elsewhere. No more top ten lists for me. :)
@martinbuster
If you have several points to your argument then a list format can be appropriate. It's better than using "also" on each new paragraph but yes, linking the points as one coherent post is the ideal. Sometimes authors lack the writing skill though or are pressed for time - I've certainly been guilty of both myself and fallen back on presenting my argument as points.
I do agree 100% on "My Top 10 News Sites" or other such rubbish, which simply lists sites or blogs in the sycophantic aim of getting the listed authors to vote them up. Also some top 10 lists which attempt to present a topic in bite-size points annoy me. They are popular with the lazy marketer but the act of editing out so much material can lead to them being inaccurate or a poor reflection on the original sources.
In those cases, I'd prefer the author would at least link back to the original source, to allow the reader to get the fuller picture. I also wish people would use "filler" points to make the list up to 10. What's wrong with using the number of points you actually *need*? (3,6,7 etc.).
Overall though, there is still a place for lists in my opinion - even though, as you say, they have been so badly abused within the social marketing space.
Exactly Nick, you hit it on the head. Perhaps there is a place for lists, but man it gets hard to look at a feed reader or whatever and it's a wall of Top Ten Lists. Sorry I posted the comment on your post as your posts are top quality and do not deserve to be lumped with the rest of the top ten crap. But I'm so tired of the top ten format I'm just refusing to read them no matter who writes them.
@martinibuster
No problem at all Roger, the issues of lists was actually something that had me thinking the other week. This gave me an excuse to put that into writing. Unfortunately we've probably abused them too much now to even use them appropriately, which is a pity. I guess I'll have to learn more paragraph linking techniques. Maybe we can push Brian @CopyBlogger to help us on that point :)
I use lists all the time to organize my own thoughts and don't mind them as long as they unnumbered and aren't promoted as lists. Top X ..., X reasons.. X easy ways... X Greatest ... those type of titles tend to tempt me to tune out quickly partly because the TITLEs make it blatantly obvious a blogger is trying to bait me.