> Tonight I was talking with an exec at Google and I brought up the success of Instagr.am (they’ve gotten more than 500,000 downloads in just a few weeks) and asked him “why can’t Google do that?”
First of all the number of downloads, especially during the period of initial hype, is not a very useful metric. But even assuming that Instagram is an amazingly successful product, it's still a little fish comparing to Google. This company is more interested in developing Android, a platform on which toys like that can be built, which by the way has more than 200,000 activations per day.
You beat me to the punch on this. I am very impressed with Instagram's success, but to say 'why can't Google build a product with half a million users?' is so completely wrong-headed that I don't even know where to begin.
First of all the number of downloads, especially during the period of initial hype, is not a very useful metric. But even assuming that Instagram is an amazingly successful product, it's still a little fish comparing to Google. This company is more interested in developing Android, a platform on which toys like that can be built, which by the way has more than 200,000 activations per day.