The behemoth that Google has become is staggering. A company that started as a search engine in March of 1996 made a net income of $6.5 billion for the year 2009. They contributed to the decline of Yahoo and have added to modern pop culture as well as adding another verb to the dictionary.
My problem with Google is their rapid expansion. There are many, many Google apps (including the one I'm using for this blog). Their apps are useful but there are so many of them, I wish that Google would devote the resources to develop any of them into a complete application.. They must be accepted and used as is with the hope that they will be continued and be supported. Most of their products are still in beta to reminder of this fact. Case in point is Google Pages and Google Gears which are no longer available.
Each app taken by itself has fairly limited capabilities and we have accepted that because it is free, but I for one, are getting frustrated with changing capabilities and rough conversion to other applications. The power of Google is that they are a one-stop shop for commonly used computer applications. With cloud computing becoming more available and with Microsoft's entry into free Web apps, Google has some stiff competition from the other larger technology giant. I'm not a huge Microsoft fan but have been caught up in the swell to switch to MS Office products many years ago, (remember Netscape and WordPerfect?) and I think I will be heading MS's way rather than using Google Docs.
As Google continues to acquire more and more companies and technologies, from phones to TV to GPS, they seem to want to be all things to all people. I wish they would just stop getting into everything and become better at the things they already do.
No comments:
Post a Comment