When will the madness end? Yes, Google is an innovative company with some great products. Search, GMail, Maps, Earth. All great stuff that have benefited consumers and made the big Internet guys like Yahoo! and MSN much better companies. Competition is indeed a wonderful thing.

But John, let’s please be honest about when Google releases a ho-hum product in the market. I follow your blog and generally think your posts are great, but the bias seems pretty clear on your blog and (even worse) in the rest of the press. You give Google lots of attention even when they don’t deserve it — and lot of other innovations from small and big companies get scant mention. Google releases a “Sidebar”. Wow!! Give me a break — MSFT and YHOO have had this for years (in the case of Yahoo!, at least for SBC Yahoo! users). Google releases IM w/ P2P voice. There is absolutely nothing innovative in this product, and yet we’re all supposed to waste time reading posts on it. If MSN or Yahoo! released such a silly product to compete with an existing Google product (for example, an inferior version of Google Earth), they would be skewered by the press and the entire blogosphere.

Google doesn’t want to be “evil” perhaps, but they do want to be a portal. Now there’s an innovative idea. As far as I’m concerned, the shine sure does seem to be coming off the Google machine. But maybe next month it’ll shine once again when they invent…sliced bread!

It’s the platform, stupid! Google OS? Maybe. Now, data is the Intel inside. Actually, the Intel outside.

Data Should be the Intel Outside
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/001480.html