There's plenty of comment out there about Google Pages (Mathew Ingram, Search Engine Watch) but what really fascinates me is the company's scattered approach to launching new services - something Peter Cashmore describes as "Spray and Pray". It's like Google has attention deficit disorder because they launch something new and, before you know it, they're onto the next big thing. Take Blogger, for example. Given the growing popularity of blogging, you would think Blogger would be a dominant, feature-rich service given Google's financial muscle and army of PhDs. But this is not the case. Instead, Blogger hasn't changed much since Google acquired it. Instead of being beefed up, it has fallen behind the competition as new players such as Wordpress have appeared on the scene. I mean, Blogger still hasn't introduced trackbacks. Picasa is another example of interesting technology that hasn't been leveraged properly - and could say the same thing about Froogle and GMail. As much as investors love Google, let's be clear here: it's a one trick-pony, although the trick is extremely lucrative. For all the talk about Larry Page and Sergey Brin becoming strategic visionaries, it's hard to see a vision unlesss it's about creating new real estate for AdSense - regardless of whether these new services are any good. Maybe there's a master plan happening that the rest of us can't grasp yet but it would be nice for Google to commit itself to doing something really well when it introduces a new service - rather than coming out with something that disappoints and doesn't move a market forward.
Update: Search Engine Journal is reporting that Google may be launching a finance site, while my friend Mathew Ingram is calling on Google to come out with a calendar so it can take GMail, Google Talk and a rumoured voice mail service to battle Microsoft's Outlook.