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Are Google's Best Days Behind It?
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.'"
When it stops being fun, it's all downhill.
Interestingly, Apple before the Second Coming of Jobs had one of the same problems Google does today: too many products, forcing them to spread their resources too thin to support them all. Apple in the 1990s had an incredible profusion of different flavors of Mac; one of Jobs' first big decisions was simplifying it down to four key product lines and throwing the rest out. (Here's video of Jobs himself explaining the situation at the 1998 Macworld keynote.) It angered a lot of people at the time, but that decision was a big part of what started Apple's turnaround.
Read my blog.
I agree with you. InfoWorld has composed a barrage of Anti-Google articles for years now mostly because of Microsoft's hands being in their back pocket. Sorry but I'm getting tired of hearing their same crap. Google is simply not going anywhere. Especially when on the other side of the spectrum, you hear news about 25 million people signing up for Google+ in the matter of just a couple weeks. AdWords alone will grow substantially thanks to G+.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
These are coordinated attacks on Google by those whom Google is out competing on a level playing field.
If marketing the best smartphone OS in the market to give them the #1 market share is evil then Microsoft is a pure saint, so soundly did the public reject Win Phone 7. If helping a company drive its 44% smartphone market share to less than 15% in one year is good competition then Microsoft is saintly indeed. I also noticed that it was that saintly company Microsoft that PR'd a lot about Google's "evil" in tracking wifi with geocordinates, but Microsoft published their own public website with the same information.
And, please tell me you'd rather have Larry Ellison rather than Larry Page influencing your web experience. IF that were the case you'd be paying a micro payment for each search, with extra added for narrowing to specifics, and there wouldn't be any other search game in town. One only has to look at how he's trying to abuse Java to realize what would happen if he ends up winning against Google, which I doubt he will unless he buys off the judge.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Until you can prove that the answer is, in fact, "no," your dismissal of the question is meaningless. Google is under a lot of fire these days. They haven't innovated in over 10 years; all there new products have been me-too follow-ups to competitors. Just because anonymous Google supporters on Slashdot don't want to hear any negative news doesn't mean there isn't something worth talking about.