The Google’s “Groundhog Day” Approach

Have you seen the movie Groundhog Day? If not let me share an insight of the movie. The movie is about a local news reporter played by Bill Murray who covers Groundhog day celebration in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. What makes the movie interesting is Bill's character keeps gets up to the same day everyday - Groundhog day. Initially he gets quite frustrated with life monotony and even tries all sorts of tricks to end it. He tries to win over his love interest played by the News reporting team producer. But he soon realized the incidents of the day are same and starts working on improving his days by changing himself slightly each day. He learns new skills right from ice sculpturing to learning piano. He keeps working on his mistakes and learning from them. Towards the end he finally wins over the new report producer and wakes up to a new day.

The learning from mistakes and improving oneself has been the approach of things on the Web. The prime example being - Google; they keep coming with these wonderful products –Gmail, Orkut, Chrome, etc... But if you look at the initial versions (beta versions) of these products they are very crude, raw and very fragile. But they keep improving on them, asking for feedbacks from the users in the form of emails, forums,blogs etc. They kept rectifying the bugs in the product and adding new features to it. Thus making the product very robust and something brand recognition when the actual product is launched.