As Bill Gates will attest, there are downsides to being king of the hill. For one, everyone wants to drag you down to the bottom even if your products/services are top-notch. If Google hasn't discovered this competitive reality, it will be increasingly difficult for Larry and Sergey to ignore it. For months, I have sensed this brewing resentment as Google unveils service after service - most of them "beta" and some of them - Google Earth - useful and cool. This anti-Google sentiment is based on the growing belief that the company is so cocky is can move into any market it wants even if what they are launching is far from innovative - i.e. Froogle. Nicholas Carr pointed out the flaws in Google's beta strategy in a post earlier this week in which he dissed many of these service as "pretty lacklustre". "Froogle, for example, is unpleasant to use, and Blog Search is just plain dreary," he said. "The tossing of half baked productgs into the web is starting to look less like a brilliant idea than a sign of hubris." The unveiling of Google Video, for example, has been slammed for its lack of content (let's not even go into the fact it's not even available in Canada) A couple days ago, Henry Blodget leapt off the Google bandwagon - or least he made a case to support jumping - with a post looking at how Google's high-flying stock could come down to earth. He cited click fraud, declining paid-search ad prices and higher fixed costs as investment risks. The latest person to take a hack at Google is BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine, who believes the publishing industry could push back on Google's use of free content to drive advertising revenue. (Jeff Jarvis believes this would be "hugely stupid" and "self-destructive" because Google has become everyone's front page.)

So what should we make of all this Google trash-talking? It's perfectly normal behaviour in a competitive, capitalistic environment. Everyone's trying to claw their way to be top dog, and if this means dissing rivals and degrading their strategies, products, service, executives, etc., that's just the way the world works. That said, it is fascinating to see how Google changed so quickly from being this cool, sort-of-small company that made an amazing search engine into a not-so-cool technology behemoth that everyone is beginning to fear. So what's Google to do? Absolutely nothing other than keeping doing what they're doing because it's clearly working.