"Google does search. Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat. ... Google's entire staff is dedicated to creating the perfect search engine and work tirelessly toward that goal."
I think the criticism would be that if their philosophy used to be focusing solely on search, and now they are doing other things, these side projects were never part of the "endgame". Perhaps they suffered from this.
Do you really think it isn't a problem that Google is building and brining to market two different competing operating systems? Google is pretty great at most things they do, but I think that they are straying from "It's best to do one thing really, really well." and that numbers among their problems.
It's fantastic that Google is developing 2 different operating systems. Even more so that they might compete in the market with each other. That's healthy. That's a company that has refused to impose strategy tarrifs on itself, a company that doesn't view itself as an empire but as a bustling hive of talent and opportunity.
Which is better: the market telling Google which (or both) of its two operating systems are viable or some VP making that decision?
The empire complex ruins big companies. It's the biggest threat to google's ability to remain a vital, innovative company in the long-run. It's good to see they haven't succumbed to it yet.
I was just implying that a lack of vision generally reduces a project's value. The more something seems to accurately predict the direction of the web, the better the vision.
If a project looks spontaneous, it could indeed be a great idea, but often it can look like something created because it's what everyone else is doing.
Since the beginning, we've focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we're designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line.
Google's support for their free products is terrible. While they may take great care to keep the user in mind while designing products, and take care to optimize for the variables they track, their claim above rings hollow in my experience.
Really? True, Google does search really well, and it makes sense that this would have been their philosophy at some point in the past. But now it seems like they would be more for something like "Do one thing really well, and once people appreciate it, do a thousand other little things."
''Since the beginning, we've focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we're designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line.''
this may be true for search but not true for instance in the case of google news http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1528216 - google news was changed to serve not the user but internal google goals - it was a change to display new technology - because they can they changed it
