GoogVid Admits Mistakes, Takes Baby Steps . . . Still Sucks
In an interesting mea culpa, Google Video Vice President Marissa Mayer admitted this week that “We made a big mistake” with the rollout of their video download service, which was graciously described by the New York Times as “appallingly half-baked.” More like not even kneaded. Clearly, it was a last-second idea, rushed out in order to meet the totally artificial deadline of making a “hey, we can do video too!!” announcement at CES.
Let’s just say that, right now, Google Video is Bridges to Babylon as compared to Google Earth’s Exile on Main Street. (iTunes is Bringing it All Back Home.)
However, it seems that Google seems to think that the mistake centered more on not putting the pay content front and center as opposed to the “slap up some thumbnails” design and the maddening lack of any kind of categorization, consistency or context for the videos they offer on their home page.
“We made a big mistake,” Mayer, who oversees all of Google’s search products, said Tuesday. “You can’t come out and launch a product like Google Video and say ‘CSI’ and ‘Survivor’ are there if they’re not on the home page.”
The solution: cram the “for sale” videos into smaller thumbnails at the top of the page, but it still only takes a couple of clicks until you are once again stuck in a giant page of 15 videos with your only navigation choice being the utterly maddening “Another 15 videos from the store” clicking away over and over and over and over and never knowing what you are going to get on the next page, but you know whatever it is, there are only going to be 15 of them just randomly picked and slapped on the page so you continue clicking away over and over and over world without end amen . . .
Or you know, you just go over to iTunes.
RSS
1 Comment(s) so far
1. Media SITREP » Netflix and Amazon join Video Download party wrote on January 27th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
[...] Video Business reports that Netflix and Amazon will soon join the video download market. Hopefully, their initial receptions will be better than those given Google Video. [...]