Deep Jive Interests

You may have heard that Google is pulling a ton of its apps out of beta today.  Richard Waters rightly notices that the actual paying subscriber base is only in the hundreds of thousands, probably several decimal places below where Google shareholders would like that to be.

The broader question for me is why Google has been a laggard in pushing / encouraging / appealing for a greater uptake in its services — get people down the funnel, so to speak from free to fee — or even, for that matter, from Google search –> free apps –> pay apps.

I get that there’s something ideologically pure about not cluttering up the Google.com home page and its SERPs.  But I’m sure that I’m not the only one who considers it a tremendous opportunity loss, and a shockingly huge marketing ineffiency.

Then again, perhaps it continues to speak of Google’s happy reliance on the adwords / adsense Golden Goose, and who knows — perhaps an equal distaste for anything that smacks of commercial “aggression”.