Internet, services bundling and Google

When my professor said that in order to succeed on internet you must have a different name from your offline name, I couldn't agree with it. Why go through all the pains of choosing a new name and branding your service again when you already have a successful brand. And why wouldn't any customer accept the offline name, which is synonymous to quality and good service, and want the retailer to have a different name.

Today, while talking about a new networking site, I got the answer. And the answer is Internet, as any other service, is intangible and thus it is all about the experience it provides. Well in that case a firm that provides good service can keep the same name offline.

The answer is NO. Because the parameters of experience on internet are different.

Some of these parameters are ease of communication and ease of navigation i.e. how easily the pages load, how easily you can move from one page to other, is there any chance of posting of user generated content, the graphics of the site, no. of features on that site for eg. chat, picture and video sharing etc.

Another parameter is the experience associated with brand. And this is where it all makes the difference. on internet, if you are established as an e-mail site you tend to remain as one. If you help user share content or if you are a micro blogging website you remain one. And that is the reason that e-bay is the first name that comes to mind when you have to shop and not Yahoo! shopping.

This brings us to subject of today....BUZZ. Yet another extension by Google to compete with Twitter and Facebook. Many are optimistic that Buzz will surely take away the market from Facebook and Twitter; the reason being: it is integrated with g-mail so now people do not need to go on other sites for social networking.

But I feel it will not affect Facebook and Twitter in any ways apart from introducing some more members to the world of micro-blogging. It will help in growing the market but it will not take away the share of Twitter and Facebook. The reason being it simply doesn't provide the experience of Twitter and Facebook. When you Buzz you still are on g-mail and that is the experience you get there, while on Twitter, Facebook and even Orkut, the experience is completely different.

So, I think if Google really wants to fight in the micro-blogging space it should develop Buzz as a completely different platform and not just as a add-on to g-mail.

The best examples will be, people use you tube for watching videos and not Google videos and the writer here is using Blogger for writing this post and not Buzz, though the features are combined.

So, Buzz has the potential to be successful but it should come out of the shadow of G-mail and Google and develop itself as a different brand.