my company uses Google Apps. It absolutely astounds me that both Buzz and Wave weren't launched first as Enterprise Apps, only. They both would have been useful as enterprise collaboration and communication tools, and having it be entirely within an organization solves the "who can I talk to" problem -- much like Facebook did by targeting college campuses. As a average schmoe -- I have zero reason to use Buzz, for anything. Get everyone in my company on it, and I'd be using it every day. Everyone would. And it's actually a great tool for that, it would solve problems that aren't addressed well by either email or the various internal wikis.
I'm actually still a little pissed Buzz hasn't shown up...more than a year after Google said "Yes, Buzz is certainly coming to Apps."
It's just a little bit mind boggling to me -- it seems so obvious. From what I understand, Buzz was (is?) used inside of Google for internal communication/discussion. THAT is the use case for it. But they launched for something else, and ignored what would have been a great starting point for the product to gain some momentum and a community of users who would go out and sell it later on.
Buzz is one of the most mismanaged products I've ever seen.
In particular its presence on Android is laughable which is just ... inexplicable. Other than being afraid of a law suit of some kind (which would be bizarre given what else Google puts on Android) I just can't understand why they haven't put Buzz front and center there.
My pet conspiracy theory is that Google has done some kind of deal with Twitter whereby they have agreed not to compete in certain ways in order to get favorable treatment wrt search.
Absolutely agreed. Buzz is used internally in exactly that way. And is very popular. But the lesson taken from that was, "We have a potentially great product here!" and not "We have a great product to use inside of corporations here!"
Your launch strategy would have worked much better.
I'm actually still a little pissed Buzz hasn't shown up...more than a year after Google said "Yes, Buzz is certainly coming to Apps."
It's just a little bit mind boggling to me -- it seems so obvious. From what I understand, Buzz was (is?) used inside of Google for internal communication/discussion. THAT is the use case for it. But they launched for something else, and ignored what would have been a great starting point for the product to gain some momentum and a community of users who would go out and sell it later on.