at least we see new ideas from Google, I prefer the idea of Google leading the internet (not owning it of course)

Google is not a search engine company and they are not an advertising company. Even though search was how they started and advertising is the current major source of revenue, Google has a simple and clear mission; “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” All of their products and services from Talk to Blogger to Grand Central to Google Earth and Analytics provides them with direct access to information and data allowing them to organize it and make it easy to access and Lively will be no exception. Think of all that data and information from this new entry to the inevitable 3-d web.

Don’t underestimate Google. They have a long view and their long view will be about making all that data easy to access and they’ll make money by either selling that easy access, helping analyze the information, or charging a premium to keep it “unlisted” like the old phone company used to do with unpublished phone numbers.

Yahoo changed their mission fairly recently and while it’s surely a lot better than before it’s still not as simple and focused as Google’s. If you have any experience with corporate mission statements and how companies use them to provide vision and guidance irrespective of time and technology and specific products or services, Google’s is one of the top of all time on these criteria alone.

Hey brain, what do you want to do tonight? Same thing we do every night, try to take over the world!

If you think of it from that perspective, then venturing into all areas for acquisition and dominance starts to make sense.

a) Stretch your resources, and investment capital dangerously thin by broadening into markets the diverge from your core strengths (ie, Google has some great apps, but they are by no means a software company like Oracle. Everything Google makes is broken in more ways than the normal user would understand. Even Gmail goes down on a bi-daily basis for short periods… The permanent “Beta” status of everything they build proves my point here.)

b) Move into markets that don’t make money, just to make sure your signs can be seen from every corner. Brand building is one thing, but I think that when a company grows to be the 10th largest company in the USA from a garage status in less than a decade, this always happens. They think that if they don’t hang the moon in every corner of the world, people will forget the light that shined during their brightest days, so they continue to 20% their way to self-destruction.

Google is strikingly easy to use as a search tool, and very powerful for advanced users, and it’s simplicity is part of what makes it that way. but sometimes companies that experience big results from a) dumb luck, or b) no-competent competitors, they seem to get this “I’m a genius” attitude, and fail to change the way they do things. Well, they created a whole internet mentality of “I can do that”, and along with that came lots of little fish that think they can eat a whale also, if they just try hard enough. What I’m trying to say is that Google really doesn’t have any competitive edge anymore with any of there services. Take a look at 37 signals. They’ve created software suites in no-time that tower over some of what Google Apps puts out. If you get enough small fish in the pond, they will eat the whale. Google needs to put some of their capital into making there applications (Other than Gmail & Search) better than what can be whipped up in Ruby no Rails in a week, or they will get eaten. In three years Google will be nothing more than a pile of decentralized startups with ideas all over the chalk board, and nothing to show their investors.