Would you like some product?

As I was hacking my way through the impenetrable (and dry-heave ugly) jungle of MySpace last night, it occurred to me that there are two ways to be successful that can be summed up by the MySpace way of doing things and the Google way of doing things.

Far too many people do things the way MySpace has done it. They've gotten incredibly successful with a highly useful but flawed product. This is fine to some extent. They can pat themselves on the back for creating a successful and desirable product. And through both habit and necessity (in a manner of speaking) they'll continue to be successful even if they just sit in their Herman Miller chairs with cigar in their mouths and their feet on their desks.

But eventually, the sheer suck of the product is going to do them in. And instead of correcting the problems, they become inwardly focused and put emphasis on new campaigns and new features, while their customers are getting increasingly frustrated with the product as a whole.

Eventually, businesses in the MySpace model will collapse. A competitor who does it better will come along, both fixing and improving upon the first big success story.

I'm afraid this is what's in store for emusic, and they haven't even gotten to be hugely successful. I'm getting more frustrated with the fact that new releases still don't show up very quickly, their search stinks and there seems to be no institutional concern with making the product better.

This is why, as my good friend Lindsay always says, I welcome our future Google overlords. It's amazing to me that so few people have figured out what makes Google so great: they fix their flaws. And what's better, they don't make the mistake of bundling these fixes in major product releases, which only inevitably disappoint the customers waiting for it. They improve every product they buy.

It's so simple: build a quality product. It seems so obvious, but people forget it in their insularity. Marketing campaigns are important, but only when you have a quality product. And you can thrive and succeed wildly on a crap product, but only temporarily.

I could make another parallel here, but I won't.