This one should be filed in the “well its about time” category. According to The Australian, Google is going to start assessing customer needs and trying to fill them, instead of building products in search of a market, as Google famously has done with just about everything else. According to Google’s newly created Strategic Planning Director Stuart Smith, “‘What typically happens is it is just a load of engineers producing a load of things and then refining until it finds an audience,’ Smith says. ‘What they have never really done is to look at audiences and understand audiences and say “perhaps there is a need over here — let’s meet that need”.’”

While I applaud the effort — and as a market researcher who has tried to work with Google in the past there is no shortage of “I told you so” in this — I’m skeptical that the Google culture will truly change. Clearly the path to success is to come up with projects that turn into products, and I would be surprised if well researched, corporate-lead initiatives had the same cache within the company. On top of that it is pretty clear the memo has not been delivered to all parts of the organization, as Google Enterprise has just launched its own lab.

Google will need to tread carefully: on the one hand becoming more programmatic and customer-centric — for a notoriously engineering driven company — is a huge improvement, but if they swing the pendulum too far there is the potential to lose the ingenuity and innovation driving the company, not to mention make it a miserable place to work. I would guess the pendulum doesn’t swing hardly at all, but even a little movement should be a major positive for consumers and (presumably) enterprise customers.

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