Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

You clearly haven't read the news this past week or so:

====Analysts said Google was fighting a problem that had historically plagued technology giants, many of which became so enamored with innovating that they forgot to create products that people would really use.

'They created a bunch of crap that they have no idea what to do with,' Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, said of Google. 'What a huge waste of resources.'

Google admitted this year that its internal audits discovered that the company had been spending too much time on new services to the detriment of its core search engine.

"I was getting lost in the sheer volume of the products that we were releasing," said Sergey Brin, Google's president of technology.====

My post reinforced the company's own statement that visitors were being confused by Google products, and that it would have to stop releasing new ones and instead concentrate on improving the things people actually use.

Of course, with a user base the size of Google's, you could argue that even a fractional percentage is huge. But that's missing the point that, in pandering to a minority of Internet users, many of whom are attracted simply by something being 'new' and 'different' rather than genuinely useful, Google is at risk of losing its core business to competitors.