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Are Google's Best Days Behind It?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the aren't-they-always dept.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister questions whether slowing product development, legal woes, and rising bureaucracy will signal trying times ahead for Google. 'With Google's rapid growth have come new challenges. It faces intense competition in all of its major markets, even as it enters new ones. Its newer initiatives have often struggled to reach profitability. It must answer multiple ongoing legal challenges, to say nothing of antitrust probes in the United States and Europe. Privacy advocates accuse it of running roughshod over individual rights. As a result, it's becoming more cautious and risk-averse. But worst of all, as it grows ever larger and more cumbersome, it may be losing its appeal to the highly educated, impassioned workers that power its internal knowledge economy.'"

3 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Startup mentality - like this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    linkg to fosspatents just shows you don't even have a vague fucking clue what you're reading. You're reading a pro-MS blog where they are about as anti-google as it gets? This article is much about zero.

    Wow, and they wrote an article anti-google? WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?!?

    jeezus troll, get the fuck off slashdot.

    How many times do we have to debunk this shit? I should hope once is enough. Maybe twice? Estoppel plus anti-FUD good enough?

  2. Re:Long story short, by jalefkowit · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's really better to think of many (most?) of Google's "products" as research projects, and remember that in many cases those "failed products" end up as parts or foundations for future products...

    Google appears to disagree: under Larry Page's leadership, they have begun pulling back on the "throw lots of things against the wall and see which ones stick" strategy.

    --

    Read my blog.

  3. Re:I'm gonna go with... by kelemvor4 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Google's main failure is that they haven't had a real big success after their search business.

    You don't consider the world's #1 smartphone OS to be a success? What do you want, every competing OS to be completely obliterated before it's successful? Gmail is pretty successful as I understand it, Maps is also successful.

    Like search, Google gives most of it's products away for free in order to feed their advertising engine. Since they're not making money DIRECTLY on the other products they might also get the benefit of being able to write off development and legal defense of other projects, too.

    I think people forget that Google is basically an advertising firm, and everything else Google does is ancillary.