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Welectricity is a simple, low-carbon service that helps you track and reduce your electricity consumption at home.
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- May 30
- 2011
Posted by Welectricity
The Google Paradox
When Google announced its PowerMeter home energy monitoring tool in February 2009, the event seemed a harbinger of something big.
After all, this was Google, one of the smartest, biggest companies on the web, launching a ‘killer app’ into the then-new home energy management space. And when Microsoft launched its competing product (the clunkily-named Microsoft Hohm) in June of the same year, the lines of an epic battle were drawn. Echoing the sentiments of many, senior greentech industry blogger Martin LaMonica called Microsoft’s entry “a move that stands to shake up home-energy monitoring”.
Two years on, things look a bit different.
Last month LaMonica reported that Microsoft, “disappointed with the uptake of its Hohm Web application for home energy efficiency”, was moving to plan B – shifting the product focus to emphasize electric-vehicle charging. And a few days ago, Google officially announced that its PowerMeter API had been “deprecated”.
In layman’s terms, it’s probably safe to say that the plug on each of these products has been pulled.
What went wrong? Why did these products, delivered to us by two of the world’s iconic high-tech firms, essentially fail?
I think they failed because they ignored the layman. Designed and built by geeks, these products connected with geeks – who undeniably are a vanishingly small fraction of the general population. Remember Google Wave, another blockbuster, category-killer product from Google’s labs? It died last August, apparently for the same reason – it was just too darn complicated. One bit of key evidence: the demo video that explained how the product worked ran an hour-and-a-half.
There was also a more fundamental problem. PowerMeter’s basic proposition was that if you give people detailed information about their energy consumption; they will be motivated to do something about it. Unfortunately this proposition is, on the face of it, false (though it does work for some people who are already motivated).
It is now well-established, though not widely recognized, that information on its own has no significant effect on such outcomes as whether consumers save energy, lose weight or smoke less; therefore, providing more granular information won’t help. We now know that consumers need motivation, not information – and motivation arises from the complex interaction of several behavioral and other factors, only one of which is information.
The paradox is that Google took a complex problem, reduced it to a simple, but flawed proposition and then proceeded to build a complex solution on top of that – eventually bringing down the entire edifice.
It’s obviously not in Google’s DNA to do simple stuff. But for PowerMeter, perhaps that was part of the problem. Or as Leonardo da Vinci, arguably the greatest genius the world has known, put it 500 or so years ago, we should believe that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.
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