They built a great search engine before it got spammed, but nowadays all they do are buy content companies or build widgety type applications that allow you to create more content so they can slap more ads on them. They’ve just been capitalising on having a big audience with itty bitty new things. Were any of these things (apart from maps) offered at the same time as they started with the search engine, they’d barely be used.

Have to disagree totally with you (disclosure: iQ are Google Enterprise partners they’re putting me up in Madrid on Sunday and Monday night, ahem).

Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Maps and Analytics – all free and all, IMHO, excellent.

I leave you with some words from Jonathan Schwartz, CEO Sun Microsystem, when using Google Maps on his Blackberry, described it thus:

“The grace with which it works comes close to a religious experience”.

Google is still, though, doing a lot better than its two big rivals (MSN and Yahoo). Have you taken a look at Yahoo’s services lately? Uniformly dreadful; the AdWords equivalent and a few of their acquisitions are marginally less horrible, but that’s it.

Google is built around search working, google’s revenue model is built around search not working.

Think about that. As long as the standard search is bringing back largely irrelevant results users will click on adds. I always found this at odds with itself.

If users could find exactly what they were looking for every time where’s the revenue. Cold economics could be stifling real innovation inside googleplex.

John

Saying that I have turned away from blogspot and host my own, so yes they need to be careful but none the less they have some superb products in their portfolio just imagine if the charged for them!