Is Google a one trick pony asks Don Dodge? According to the BusinessWeekOnline article So Much Fanfare, So Few Hits it would seem so.   The reason people discuss all of Google’s announcements for new products is …. they are the market leader.   Look, everyone follows President Bush’s announcements even though most of them are flat too (not much content or staying power there).

"Consider just a few examples: Google Talk, an instant-messaging service launched last August, now ranks No. 10, garnering just 2% of the number of users for market leader MSN Messenger, according to comScore Media Metrix. Three-month-old Google Finance, heralded as a competitor to market leader Yahoo! Finance, has settled in as the 40th-most-visited finance site, according to data from Hitwise, a competitive intelligence firm. Gmail, the e-mail service that was lauded at its 2004 launch for offering 500 times as much storage space as some rivals (they quickly closed the gap), today is the system of choice for only about one-quarter the number of people who use MSN and Yahoo e-mail." "Take Orkut, Google’s two-year-old social-networking site. Since making an initial splash, Orkut has seen limited changes and has faded in popularity everywhere except Brazil. Today it draws less than 1% as much U.S. traffic as MySpace".

I don’t use Google Talk, Google Finance, Orkut - but those products are competing against brands that pretty much define themselves by their products.  Unless Google wants to focus on running and expanding a business it’s probably not going do as well as they products they are trying to replace - because they’ll have to become more of a bureaucracy - like the businesses they replaced!   Google does want to be Evil - yet they may need to be more evil if they want to succeed and become the market leader in products other than Search.