Henry Blodget suggests that Google "try links" on its home page. Obviously, such advice shows Henry's bias towards making the Street numbers before most anything else. In the same posting, we get a quote from Sergey Brin as saying, “What we are concerned about is that if we continue to develop so many new individual products … you will have to essentially search for our products before you can even use them.”
Instead of suggesting links on Google.com, I am strongly of the opinion that Google.com should stay as "clean" as possible, thus reinforcing its brand identity of being uncluttered. On the other hand, from a usability + business model perspective, yes, Google needs to make it extremely easy for people to aggregate/personalize their Google experience (i.e. have a starting page from where one can access all the various Google services. To go a step more in this direction, why not even have Google suggest some layouts based on the user's activity? So, Google should bring somehow front and center the ability for its users to customize their Google experience, in addition to being able to advertise for new services.
Instead of suggesting links on Google.com, I am strongly of the opinion that Google.com should stay as "clean" as possible, thus reinforcing its brand identity of being uncluttered. On the other hand, from a usability + business model perspective, yes, Google needs to make it extremely easy for people to aggregate/personalize their Google experience (i.e. have a starting page from where one can access all the various Google services. To go a step more in this direction, why not even have Google suggest some layouts based on the user's activity? So, Google should bring somehow front and center the ability for its users to customize their Google experience, in addition to being able to advertise for new services.
From the other point raised in Henry's posting, one should see how clever Brin is when he says that "you will have to essentially search for our products before you can even use them." Being myself involved in several web-publishing projects, I can highly appreciate the (content-, in my case, applications- in Google's) ideas visitors indirectly lead you to by their searches.
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