They've lost me, I'm no longer a fan of Google. They are no longer innovating, they are now just chasing everyone else and trying to beat them at the game they just created. The problem is that they are not beating anyone and they are messing up the things that they were once very good at as well.
Here is what I mean... (and this is just a few)
Twitter - Google Buzz (Failed)
Facebook - Google Wave (Failed), Google+(Not so sure about this one either)
Open Office - Google Docs (Failed), then they just bought Open Office
iOS - Android (Failing) I'm calling this a failure because this is what Android looks like and this is Google's business model
Here are a few more Google flops and those don't even include non-web products.
But it's always a chase with Google. The fact is they are all over the tech board. "Hey, some kid just invented a successful social network, let's show him who's boss!" then they fail at it. But they are still pretty good at search which is sad because they can't even stop messing with it. Is their search so bad that they need to make 500-600 changes to their algorithm every year?
(I'm going to do a follow-up post to the search problems later... I'll let you know where you can find it when it goes live)
The latest chase that I was willing to sit through was last week when they had their Google Maps press conference where they underwhelmed everyone and they did it deliberately five days ahead of Apple's WWDC 2012 to try to take away from Apple's announcement of their own Map product which is everything that Google feared it would be. (and probably more)
In my opinion, Google is distracted, disoriented and discombobulated and Microsoft is catching up to them fast with Bing. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Bing overtake Google in search within the next 5 years.
So I'm sitting this one out, I'm no longer an investor, it was a nice run but I think Google is about to start it's journey down the same path that AOL took back in the late 90's.
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