Google, one trick pony?

Everyone agrees that Google is a fantastic company, brilliant, innovative, cool, blah blah blah. But what exactly has Google excelled in, other than its core search? How do its other products make any sense?

Blogger: Google bought Blogger ages ago, and have done pretty much nothing with it since. Too many of those blogs are spam, link manipulation or other rubbish. The ads that do appear are often badly placed and uncoordinated. You can bet Google make peanuts from Blogger (peanuts means under $5 million annually). What have they been doing with Blogger all this time? Please don't tell me they have been changing the UI to look like Gmail, that would be pathetic.

Gmail: Woohoo! Schmidt keeps telling us how Gmail revolutionised email. Eric, either you know you are lying or you believe your own hype. How did it change anything? Fine, it forced Hotmail and Yahoo to increase storage to 250MB or whatever (true, I used to be limited by Hotmail's 2 MB: now that I have 250MB, I use all of 3MB). Forcing your competitors to tweak their offering is hardly newsworthy. Gmail has a funky new interface; so does Office 2003 and I don't hear anyone fainting with orgasms over that. And Gmail introduced threading - for every person who likes that, I can find you two who don't understand it. Even if Gmail had not botched the privacy/ads thing, the chances of them making real money off my email to granny are zero.

Images: I love Google Images, but it makes no money for them.

News: Also, quite useful, zero revenues.

Froogle: Useful, but odd. If Froogle really works, why do they need to put ads down the side (I know why, but there is a conflict of interest there). Again, not much money here. Google cannot have made more than one or two peanuts (see definition above) off Froogle. Yahoo! Shopping beats Froogle on traffic and revenues by an embarrassing margin.

Deskbar: Ha! Remember this?

Desktop: This is pretty cool, but has no prospects for ad revenues. Why is Google doing desktop search? This cannot be an end destination, since it is dependent on an OS (especially Microsoft) and is incompatible with the whole web 2.0/web services thing; it must be a stepping stone to users moving their files online.

Groups: I will withhold judgement seeing as they just redesigned it, but I am not set on fire by thoughts of Google Groups.

Orkut: This site is OK (that's all) when it works, but performs as badly as boo.com used to in the days of narrowband.

Various random other: What happened to Picasa? Who will remember to use scholar and limit themselves when many of the scholar results are on the main web anyway? How does Google feel about Yahoo launching better or "sooner" local search, video search, image search, shopping, RSS, etc?

Google has six decent products other than core search:

• News, Images, Desktop: zero revenues (and desktop seems a bit out of place to me).
• Blogger: Poor quality, small revenues.
• Gmail: Unclear business model, poor quality content for ads.
• Froogle: conflicts with ad model.

This means one of two things. Either, Google is launching these properties to drive revenues, and is thus failing spectacularly. Or it is up to something else, and revenues from these properties are immaterial. I know what most people will prefer, of course: Google is up to something so vast and huge, no one can understand it (like the Catholic definition of God). In probably the most famous blog post about Google, we read that:

This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?

Please, give me a break, the social networking service is on constant crash mode, the email service is in beta, the shopping engine has pathetic traffic figures. Yahoo runs just as much stuff.

OK, maybe Google has a master plan, but until we understand the Great Strategy in the Sky, let us admit that Google's real earth offerings are at best a little weird and disjointed, and plain average.