My Love Hate Relationship with Google Docs, and by Extension Google

I have been a strong proponent of using Google Docs to create off-line storage of your important files.  No more.

What happened?  Simply put: it worked until it stopped.  I do not know if that is because  I reached 96% usage of the 1 GB of non Google Docs formatted files, or something else, but I found that it started to behave inconsistently.  Strange, strange things would happen.  For example: (1) a document would show in one view, but not another; (2) the number of documents in folders plus the number of documents not in folders were less than the total number of documents; (3) I would delete a document but it would reappear a few days later.  This opened doubts in my mind regarding if I would be able to recover my files when I needed them.  Doubt and critical file storage do not make good bedfellows.

The obvious solution was to see if buying more space would eliminate the problem.  But, you cannot do that.  You can buy more space for email by going pro, but that does not impact Google Docs – coming soon?  The next step was to reach out to customer service – oh, yes!  There is no customer service.  So, I went pro, found out via email over a day or so that they could not solve any of this and downgraded.   This might be a way for Google to run its business, but it was increasingly clear that it was not the right way for me to run mine.  I started to work out alternative solutions to Google Docs.  Fortunately, they have added a download feature recently so that I could extract my 1,000 or so documents.  The question now was where to transition to.

I spoke to some folk, researched on the web, made a few calls and decided to go with Box.net.  It is different, but has some good features that will help us share and run our business better.  It costs money, but also has customer service.  I also get the sense that the profit motive will encourage them to ensure that their service works and improves over time.

The key insight is that Google by giving products away for free does not have the same customer relationship as someone who sells their products.  As long as the area is of interest to Google (for their business needs) they will offer and enhance the service, but they are not offering the service for the sake of servicing customers with it.  They are offering it for other objectives, and ultimately that means that the service might need to be OK, but not great.  When you sell a service, for profit, you listen to your clients, you find out their needs and you meet them.  You work to ensure your customers are happy and you find ways to enhance the service so that you can up-sell features.  You worry when things do not work and you are scared about the competition.  I am not sure that this is the case for all the free products that Google offers.  It is free to use some of them, for some of the time, when they care.  If Google decides to end a service, well they can do so and lose no revenues!  Though customers might want a Google Voice desktop product, but if Google decides that this is inconsistent with its everything-in-the-cloud philosophy then it will not happen.  The profit motive is a powerful tool to align customer and service providers objectives – Google does not have that in may of its offerings.

So, do I love of hate Google Docs?  I am not sure.  I have replaced a lot of Google interaction with Box.net, but still love some of the sharing aspects of Google Docs.  Does this make me feel less positive about Google?  not yet as I rely on Gmail and it works great (until it doesn’t).

“I Don’t Use Twitter” – Huh?

I hear this from a lot of very intelligent people.  In fact, when I ask someone if they tweet I generally know the answer before I even ask it.  I do not then proselytize, but it is instructive how many people do not understand the benefit of using Twitter.

To me Twitter is the digital equivalent of broadcasting.  This allows me to take a very simple view re users: there are two types – those that “broadcast”, and those that “listen”.  Broadcasters and those with something to say: celebrities, brands, news organizations, and folks like me that like to share curated information with other.  Listeners, are, well, the rest of us.  Twitter provides a listener some of the best dynamic aggregation of relevant content out there.  How to find interesting content?  Well one way is to use Klout’s BirdBrain took (full disclosure: Klout is a portfolio company and I sit on the Board), but there are many ways.  For those that do broadcast Klout provides great tools to measure your influence, even it it is as pathetic as mine, and ranks my influence vs. everyone else’s.

I suspect as time goes on more and more people will listen into Twitter, and find it a great source of relevant curated content from their favorite news and entertainment sources.  A few simple souls like me will continue to broadcast into the ether with a belief that in some small way they are helping humanity, as well as increasing their ego via the Klout Score:

Is it a Business?

My run-rate for looking at businesses is over one a day, and rapidly approaching two.  I enjoy almost every meeting, and in fact cannot think of one that I have not found useful.  As a firm we end up investing in a very small proportion of what we see, perhaps one percent or so.  Of late, I have been meeting with a number of companies that in effect are features, and not businesses and a number that would work great if everyone would adopt their product.  Both of these are red flags to me.

So, what is a “feature”?  It is a business that is not a business, it is something that in itself is neat or cool that improves fun or efficiency.  It has no revenue model, and if successful can be copied by existing players or new entrants in the space.  It probably can’t be patented effectively and if could you would not have the resources to defend yourself.  It is the stuff dreams are made of, but often not businesses.  It is narrow in its application, or something that could be wide if everyone changed what they do today and do it differently using this new wizbang feature.  Businesses that start as features often spend a lot of energy looking to back into a business model.  A few make it.  Twitter?

This brings me to adoption.  The biggest area I have difficulty with, and where I am likely to disagree with an entrepreneur,  is with user adoption.  Start-ups want to change the world, and to do that effectively they often need to change behavior from “I would never Tweet” to “Twitter is where I get all my cool news” or from “the iPad will never take off” to “I watched two movies on my last trip and read 5 books, all on my iPad”.  The question is when you try to change the world will it change with you?  This comes down to user adoption curves and entrepreneurs’ vision as to the ease of take-up/deployment of their product.  Often they simply underestimate the difficulty of gaining customers.  The key question that they do not have a perspective.  Is this a problem?  Yes and no.  On the one hand they have to have an unreasonable belief and passion for their idea, because if they do not it will never happen.  On the other hand this can border on the delusional.  What is most essential is that the entrepreneur tries to understand why others question their adoption assumptions and then communicate effectively their perspective.  If you are raising money this can be the most difficult idea to get across.

I do not have a checklist when I meet with investors, but if I did these would be top of the list.