Dude…seriously… Google is the one who has to be afraid. They are rolling out so many new products, but are not able to stick with them.

1. Google Answers … http://answers.google.com/ - An excellent service. Researchers were hand-picked after being passed through some rigorous tests. Customers paid to get quality research done, and the price is very cheap for the kind of quality you can get. Yet, it paid the researchers well enough, and a lot of researchers survived on that kind of income.
Current situation: Email Notifications have stopped working and no one at Googleplex is replying. They have removed Google Answers from the services link. They are slowly killing it

2. Google Search Engine: The very thing that “made” Google. Today, Google search engine’s quality has gone down a lot.

Has Google actually invented anything? Have they come up with anything unique?
Search engines existed before Google came up with it
eMail existed before Google came up with it
Their current range of products is a MS-Office clone
Text ads existed before Google came up with it
Satellite pictures existed before Google came up with it (Terraserver)
Maps & driving directions existed before Google came up with it
Picture organizers & photo albums existed before Google came up with it

In fact, Google didn’t come out with any of the latest things. They have bought out companies who have the cool stuff - Writely, 2Web, Keyhole, Picasa etc… so Google is nothing but a large corporate house buying out the smaller players. I agree Microsoft does that too, but at least they create a lot of stuff on their own.

Google seems to be focusing on quantity and not quality. A lot of the marketing decisions have been crap. They are still thinking like the bunch of Stanford PhD students who founded the company. Typical PhDs…. they come up with new stuff….show it off to the world, and forget about it forever!

I posted a few observations on my site.

Interesting program; not sure if I’ll ever use it much, but interesting. And hopefully the new features and interface innovations will translate to the other suites. That would no doubt be the best outcome.