Google Wasting Energy with Useless Services while Yahoo is Kicking Ass

sido
2005-04-02T10:12:56Z

Is Google really wasting so much time on 'cool projects' like RideFinder that are ultimately not useful?

Could the service be any more useless than it is? Sure, the concept is a workable one. But get it right. Don't just show me a small portion of available taxis. (There's no way that Chicago has only 100 or so taxis, all of them on the North side of town.) And it's impractical to show taxis in New York, so it shows shuttles. What about showing buses and trains, something even more useful than a few taxi locations? Heck, you could even show buses and trains in New York.

Google's sneaky advertising will get them in trouble. It can't be more than a few bucks they're getting from the taxi companies. If they're trying to develop something that the internet community actually needs, they're not succeeding. In a desperate attempt to outshine Yahoo, they've recently doubled storage capacity for their GMail service. They could easily outshine Yahoo or Hotmail even more by making GMail available to the general public, rather than just the web elite. (GMail turns 1 year old in April.) If they're keen on continuing to distance themselves from everyday people (such as Yahoo isn't), they could at least start to love RSS.

The other projects in Google Labs are at least worthy of some development. But to use PhD brainpower on how to best find a few taxis in Phoenix rather than how they're going to kick Yahoo's ass is plain stupid.