While Google is clearly still a huge and impactful company, it appears things are heading in the wrong direction. If that’s true, it’s easy to point to where the slide began.
Back in 2018 Jeff Bezos told his employees that one day Amazon will fail. He’s not wrong, but his intent was inspiration to keep them on the right track. Going a bit deeper, here is the exact part of that talk that stood out to me:
“If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end. We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible.”
That’s clearly where Google has failed. They focused on their customers for 20 years, but over the last five they’ve becoming heavily inward-focused. If you look at the four items on my recent post about why Google is failing, all of them are things that they’ve turned from customer benefits to internal money-saving.
On one hand, it’s understandable. Things get a little tighter, so you work to raise the bottom line a bit. The problem is that when you do things at the expense of your customers, you have no choice but to keep tightening things up and it becomes a death spiral.
Media Play
It reminds me of one of the last times I bought something from Media Play, probably 20 years ago. They were already fading, but they were clearly trying to squeeze every last bit they could. Upon checkout, the poor woman checking me out had to go through like 10 different up-sells (mailing list, membership, extra batteries, etc). It was super annoying, though I know she was only doing it because management required it. When a company starts getting desperate, you know they’re in trouble.
Google has sailed past the point of “start to focus on ourselves“, and I feel that it’s only going to get worse from here.
Media Play went from creation to death in 14 years. Part of that was they were opening brick and mortar as the internet was taking off, but a lot of it had to do with what you state here. Always felt like they cared more about squeezing every possible dollar out of whomever walked in the door vs. providing a great experience.
The internet absolutely would have killed them anyhow, and I don’t know how they could have ultimately avoided it. Still, they bailed a few years earlier than they needed to because of their awful customer experience.