The Google Way

The Google Swiss Army Knife

Google's Swiss Army knife approach to product development solves many of the problems that plague other product strategies. For one thing, every Google tool (or application) can be used autonomously—separate from other Google applications. If you really like Google Maps, for example, but you don't like Google Documents, you can just use Google Maps. That's not to say you can't use one Google tool with another, but the idea so far has been that you don't need to use tools together.

Unlike Microsoft's Office suite, Google tools go through separate development cycles and are released incrementally as features are ready. The release of a new version of Gmail, for example, doesn't replace the Gmail that you're already using, ...