Will “Early Access” Lead To Market Domination?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

There’s a new search engine in town. Again.

It’s called Wolfram Alpha. And I’m not kidding.

The funny thing is this: On its blog, Wolfram Alpha claims to be a “service unlike any other”. OK. Couldn’t the same be said of Martinizing?

We’ve all seen search engines try to challenge Google before. While Wolfram Alpha isn’t making bold and outrageous claims like the guys at Cuil did, their entrance into the search field is something of a joke. So they can tell us how far the moon is from planet earth at any time during its rotation? Great. How many people really want to know that?

Seriously, you can’t talk face to face with 300 people and expect to get a good feel for what the market place needs. “Early access” for a service that only a handful of people want or don’t know they need is hardly spectacular. Many other companies have introduced technology that has never been seen before only to be outdone by Google a few weeks later because they weren’t aware that the 900-pound gorilla had been testing the technology for two years.

I’m not saying we should all rely on Google all the time. But let’s give credit where credit it due. Google does do things the right way. They test and test and test again. And when the time is right they’ll roll out their brand new babies. They don’t all succeed, but they have been tested to the hilt. I’m betting that it won’t be long before Google rolls out its own similar version to Wolfram Alpha’s computational knowledge software. And they’ll likely get a lot more attention for it.