| image: wikipedia |
I still remember the last years of the 90’s when users of that time used mainly two email services: Hotmail or Yahoo!
None of them was exactly my favorite but there wasn’t much to choose from so you had to “to accept“the existing conditions set by them for the use of mail.
For those who lived that decade will remember:
- Hotmail offered up to 2 MB of space as long as you did not stop using your account for more than 60 days, otherwise it would be deactivated to save your server space.
- Yahoo was not much different and you could have more than 2 megabytes as long as you were willing to pay a few dollars for the expansion right.
That was how limited and outdated email was until one fine day …
The emergence of Gmail as an innovative proposal
One fine day I heard about the innovative mail service of a new web technology company that was emerging.
That company was Google. And what Google did seems to me to this day surprising and worth learning.
To begin with, I offered you without cost an email account of 2000 Megabytes of space for life, without restrictions, without expiration, much faster, super friendly and with the slogan “you will never have to erase anything again“.
This was 1000 times more space than what its competitors were offering and as you can imagine, I was instantly hooked. Do not doubt anything and change me immediately. Which also did millions of people.
In fact, today it is still my favorite email option and by far my favorite web services company.
And this was just the beginning, as email is just one example of how Google penetrated the market in a creative and innovative way but at the same time commercially aggressive.
It was a matter of time before it did the same for search engines, mass storage systems, contextual advertising, operating systems, and other services.
It didn’t take long for it to position itself as No. 1 in the main online service segments.
3 Lessons We Can Learn from Google
1. Do not trust yourself, do not settle
The question I always ask myself is: what about my business?
How far can we be a kind of Microsoft or Yahoo confident and comfortable in our position of “leadership“While people use our products or services because they have no other alternative or because there is no one more aggressive to come and take over our market?
What can we do better today? This is a good time to evaluate what you are doing to strengthen your business model and gain even more ground in your business segment.
A good starting point to innovate is to analyze the weaknesses of your competitors and do extraordinarily well what they don’t know how to do.
If there is a company that has its eyes on the future and that is always thinking about doing better what already exists, that company is Google. You can do it too.
2. Reinvent your business model
The history of email actually has a simple explanation to understand today that gives us an incredible business lesson.
For many at the time it was surprising how a company could suddenly offer 2000 megabytes of email space compared to the limited 2 megabytes offered by Microsoft and Yahoo (which were not small companies).
And it is that while the two technology giants were betting on selling storage space (which was their business model), Google saw in email the opportunity to sell advertising through analyzing the content and interests of users.
For Google, the business was getting more happy users because if they used its platform, it could better sell its contextual advertising solutions.
Model that a few years later Facebook also replicated masterfully.
Hence, Google bet on “giving away” a better mail service because its business potential lay in the advertising that it would show to users and that forever transformed the way of doing business online.
3. Do things differently
I always say it in my lectures, Google was not the first search engine. There were already many before them. Nor was it the first mail service.
But its secret has been having the ability to see beyond and do things in such a way that they exceed the user’s expectations by creating novel experiences that we all love.
You don’t have to be the best at everything, but you do have to be unique in the way you do things. – (unknown)
We are in the digital age where people demand more practical and innovative solutions every day and your clients will not be the exception.
If you take the best of these 3 business innovation lessons and put them into practice in the daily management of your company then you will achieve amazing results.
Easy? Not at all, no one said that undertaking would be easy. Entrepreneurship is a challenge. Keep going!
