Blogging

I was quite excited when I woke up yesterday and found that Google Analytics had finally been launched. There had been rumours of Google taking the Urchin product they bought a year ago and making it vastly free for most customers – and now that rumour is a reality.

Problem is that Google continues to mess up with its launches. Most people tend to be way overly forgiving with Google, partially because it’s a new and fun company and partially because it slaps “beta” on almost all of its products.

The problem is that the new and fun bit is starting to go by the wayside after an increasing number of useless or poorly executed launches (I won’t even say “beta” here, because beta is the new mega-launch). Anyone remember Orkut’s launch? Google Reader’s? Google Blog Search’s? Google Video’s?

All had massive issues, including (but not limited to) scaleability. There were also huge issues around the web whenever Google extends the Gmail login to a new service, especially if you already signed up for the service with a Gmail login.

Yesterday’s Analytics launch was probably the worst launch Google has ever had, though. Not only could thousands of people not download the software, not only could many folk on Safari or Opera not even GET to the software, but everyone who did get to the software found it to be incredibly, incredibly slow.

Like a dead dog trying to play ultimate frisbee kind of slow.

The biggest problem with this is that the new “customers” were on the same servers as all the tens of thousands of existing customers paying 200$/month. Google just screwed with nearly 20M$/month in income. The entire system is useless for everyone.

Oh, but some people managed to get in. Some managed to include the right code on their site to track stats. Only to be told that these “real-time analytics” took 12 hours to compile the first data set.

For me, that was 24 hours ago and no reports. For Darren it’s been almost 35.

We were actually quite looking forward to this application for b5media because it would allow us not only to track stats per site (and globally), but also to allow each blogger to login to just their stats. Which is cool. Very cool.

I’m sure that Google will sort this out in a week or two, but you’d think for a company who’s main technological resource is the ability to scale to mind-blowing levels, scaleability by having 10K new customers join in a day would be a non-issue.

And, no, Google Analytics is not a “beta” product. It’s Google’s first real “final” product in a very, very long time (and they just bought it and re-labelled it). No excuses this time boys. Fix this, fix your internal process for launching projects and get this right both for your existing customers and your new ones.