The Economist writes:
Google is thus starting to look a bit as Microsoft did a decade ago, with one strength (Windows for Microsoft, search for Google) and a string of mediocre me-too products. Google Video, for instance, was supposed to become an online marketplace for video clips, both personal and business, but has been overtaken by YouTube, a start-up that is a few months old but already has four times as much video traffic. Google News, where the stories are, characteristically, chosen by mathematical algorithms rather than by editors, perennially lags behind Yahoo! News, with its old-fashioned human touch. Google’s instant-messaging software is tiny compared with AOL’s, Yahoo!’s and MSN’s.
…
Google thus finds itself at a defining moment. There are plenty of people within the company who want it to play the power game. The folks who are closest to Larry and Sergey are very, very worried about Microsoft, as well they should be, says John Battelle, the author of a blog and a book on Google. Yet the company’s founders themselves may not be prepared to drop their idealism and their faith in their own mathematical genius.
