The Google engineers didn’t stay up late nights worrying about Microsoft Outlook. They worried about paper. Google’s Carl Sjogreen gave a talk at The Future of Web Apps today and Rakesh Agrawal covered it in his blog.
Carl gives some insight into the Google development process:
- 1 product manager and 3 engineers
- internal interest and customer feedback drove project
- talked to real would-be customers, PTA moms, students, working families
- did several private betas
- always have an eye on minimal feature sets
- biggest competitor is paper calendaring
Carl didn’t say how long the development process took unfortunately.
Also in the news today, an article in the Washington Post covering Google’s acquisition strategy, which is typically to buy modest firms with niche expertise. It’s a good round-up.