Google’s Marissa Mayer has been with Google since 1999 and is one of its first twenty five employees. Needless to say she’s one smart cookie and in another life, could quite easily slot in neatly as a politician or press liaison. Have you watched many of her interviews? She has a knack for giving detailed answers to questions yet seemingly never truly disclosing anything at all.
This time round during an interview on Digg Dialogg it was really no different. Fortunately one question did reveal just a little bit more than most; what have been Google’s biggest mistakes?
Mayer coyly listed three, the first being Google Wave, the product Mayer claimed she was most excited about just a year or so before.
“Wave. Certainly there are things we’ve learnt from that, certain things we would have done differently.”
Next up, the timing of the shut down of DejaNews.
“Shutting down Dejanews.com at 11am on a Monday morning, and not having anywhere to post to or browse usegroups was perhaps a mistake”
Finally, the timing of the launch of Gmail:
“Launching Gmail on April Fools day was widely misinterpreted”
Google is known for going to extra lengths every April 1st, so launching an email service when hotmail and Yahoo already had established competing products left many believing it was yet another joke. It wasn’t till the next day that sceptics began believing this new Gmail product was here to stay.
Interesting there was no mention of Google Buzz’ privacy disaster, settled today.
Watch the full interview below.
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