the beginning of the beginning of the end
I was talking about Google with Matt last night — more specifically, when they'll fall from grace. He thinks it might be a while, and considers the period when the Gmail Generation begins running for office a likely date for the turn, what with all the secrets that have been entrusted to them.
Personally, I think it'll be much sooner. The cracks in the facade are showing: Google Pages is a bust; Orkut is mostly a bust; Google Talk is mostly a bust; and I'm deeply dubious about Google Base ever turning into anything. Amazon S3 seems to have beaten GDrive to market. We'll see if they ever do a web-based office suite replacement, I suppose — their Writely acquisition is suggestive, but I have doubts about them being able to pull off a really compelling Word replacement in the browser.
There are plenty of failures that I'm forgetting, too. Google fans generally defend this hit-or-miss history by saying the company throws stuff at the wall and sees what sticks. But now they're having trouble with their core offering, too: from what I'm reading, their search difficulties extend beyond the Sitemaps problems I've been having. The "site:" operator hasn't been working correctly, and the debut of a new crawler codenamed "Big Daddy" has been wreaking havoc with folks' PageRanks.
The trouble in search-land seems like big news. If they can't keep a handle on the cornerstone of their business, the company will stop looking quite so much an eclectic whiz kid and begin appearing a bit more like an ADD-addled savant. Now that they're public, a loss in confidence could send their suspiciously dot-commie culture and strategy spiralling off into unpleasant places.
Or maybe I'm just feeling pissy because Gmail has been screwing up all day. Either way, I'm souring on GOOG.
