Google’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness

Ask anyone on the street what they know of Google and chances are you will get either that it is a great search engine or in some cases it is The Internet. Once you start getting into more tech circles you’ll hear that it’s a great email client (it isn’t) or in some more rare cases they’ll say how great of an RSS reader it is.

The fact is that Google’s strength and popularity rests entirely on its search engine which for the majority of people is oh so technical and geeky. Google has added to that perception by its drive for simplicity – to hide the complexity of search behind a bland and simple interface.

The company hasn’t been helped either by stories like the decision process of selecting the right shade of blue to use on it’s search pages or how important it is to the engineers of the company to shave off milliseconds of their page load time. It is things like this that leads people to look at Google as a company of engineers and really techie oriented people. They don’t see a company made up of people or having a soul.

This perception has created nothing but problems for Google as it tries desperately to find its way in the new world of the social web.

There is no denying the fact that they have had some brilliant ideas but unfortunately as cool as things like Wave and Buzz might be they can’t break out of the it’s for the techies perception that wraps itself around all of Google’s products, other than search.

It’s not that Google hasn’t tried, as evidenced most recently by Buzz, but it can’t even buy its way in or Orkut wouldn’t be languishing as the most popular social networks of just India and South America. Chances are if you asked anyone outside of those areas they wouldn’t have a clue as to what Orkut was.

Now thanks to a rumor dropped by Kevin Rose, founder and CEO of Digg, on Twitter that Google is looking to take on Facebook with something called Google Me everyone in the tech blogosphere has jumped into dissecting mode. As much fun as this might be I think that Mathew Ingram at GigaOM said it best

But one thing is almost certain: the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against the search engine company. Despite its size and market clout, Google hasn’t shown that it has any real understanding of how social networking actually works, or any idea what to do with it.

You see Google has two things working against it in any effort to break into the social web. The first is as Mathew points out a lack of understanding of what the social web is and how it works. This is an unfortunate byproduct of its foundations as a an engineering based company where everything can be broken down into mathematical algorithms and measured in milliseconds.

The social web, and its marketing arm – social media, is almost antithetical to the Google philosophy and I think it is this fundamental difference that make it almost impossible for Google to understand where they are going wrong. That isn’t to say that they won’t find their way but I think it will take much more than just hiring a bunch of open source guys and looking for a head of their social efforts.

It is going to take a major shift in their corporate mindset. I believe, having used Buzz and interacted with some of the team members, that there are a large number of employees who do get it. However they are all operating within the confines of a culture that has been built around the alter of the algorithm and until that changes Google will continue to have problems.