The funny thing is even the "original insight that ads marry well with searches" was originally innovated by Overture (which was acquired by Yahoo). Google ended up issuing 3.7 million Google shares to Yahoo to settle the patent infringement.

The only original "innovation" of Google was Larry Page's PageRank, which increased the relevancy of search results. It started as a Stanford graduate research project in 1995 and led to a functional prototype in 1998, when Google was founded.

Though I would say Gmail's no folder system can be considered novel, while Google New's aggregation is pretty useful.

hi Matt,

I agree that there's a lot of hubris out there but......

#7 Google Earth : http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/06/google_earth_and_sketchup.html
gives you an idea of where Google Earth fits in the new scheme of things.

You're missing the web 2.0 perspective in most of your evaluations. Especially for Google Maps.

Both Larry and Sergey will agree with you that a lot of innovation does NOT come from Stanford PhDs but they're not only recruiting PhDs -- anyone who's smart, fit in and can deliver.

BR,
~A

you left out that little known thing called Gmail.

I agree, I agree and I AGREE! So true!

Innovation is making something that's already invented better i thought.

Bad at everything else?
Maps?
Google is the bleeding edge, period.
Look at:
The Google Open Office and Firefox deals. People are getting paid for adverting Firefox trough Google.
You might be right about Google not having the OS and Office market which is core but I at least can use Linux to access the best robot in the world. Google that is Linux friendly. You might be right about Google being a one trick pony in the sense of just web stuff but maybe they don't want to own the desktop because they surely are working with Linux by supporting Openoffice and Firefox. Flicker does well with Linux for that mater too.

It innovated search in the last 10 years waaaaaay beyond anything else. Like the book search and the music search was the first done in a fast way. Search is computing to the core and the most powerful thing that Micrsoft never did well. It's the ways that they did it that make them innovative. Actually they were the first to do the video search.
Plus the use of open source and Google Summer of Code. Either the magazine article stinks or you're missing these too.

Even their building has biodegradable soundproof cotton on the walls and then the free organic food taken from local farms. What company does this and does it right.
Microsoft just copied them later with their building.

Also I wanted to add that Google was the first to come up with and initiate the idea of free internet access and are a driving force of the Silicon Valley effort to do so. This excludes the money grubbing Earthlink who ultimatley decided to cut deals with the government and now our taxes are being raised on VOIP for Internet access to farms.
Google wants to provide Internet for free to support their business, and they don't need the government or MS to get in the way.
They were also the first to publicly to initiate the stand against ISP snooping.
Google is cutting edge and it's hard for me to see why that's not seen by the author.

Dude, if google wasnt there we would have been living in the OLD ages.

Hotmail was a 2MB service for gods sake!!! only reason they increased was the GMAIL competition. If that is not innovation then i dont really care what innovation is.

Same will happen to Excel and Word, unless microsoft starts doing better stuff with their money and time, free alternatives will appear making our lives better, rather than restricting us to that awful stuff microsoft supplies us with.

A window + word = definite crash and loss of article (or loss of the last 4 minutes of typing if ur a frequent saver).

Online office alternatives will be a great change once they include as many features. saving on the run and sharing with other people, and not fearing a virus will ruin all what u got

Hi, thinking back, Google is innovative in application. But that's not the point of been innovative for the sake of innovation.

True innovation come from solving user's needs not to create innovative product as a concept or try it out.

Google will be better off educating the user of those so called "innovative" product produce by their engineer first rather than put those into hand of user and let them explore and then wonder "what the heck is this trying to do".

Teaching user how the application of their product help the user is part of innovation process. But google engineer only want to create product and does not want to communicate and market to user. That's how Google will eventually failed unless it brush up its act.

What make google prominent now is its high share price and publicity. Take away those, and u see probably a "me-too" company.

I can see that company lack direction in term of innovation. They speak and eat innovation but does not know where innovation is heading in their company.

As long as they produce something and the press review it, they consider innovation well done.

As good as if a anything produce an egg, it must be a hen. hmmm... sound like Google.

You're not looking at the big picture. The big deal with Google is that they are doing all of this stuff and providing it to everyone for free. The really interesting thing to think about is where they are going with it. I think they have some big plan that we just don't know about yet.

As for innovation, they are releasing new products like every month. Its a work in progress.

The most important thing about Google, in my opinion, is that they are changing the way people use the internet and the way people use their computers. They are organizing all of the information in the world. And they are driving innovation from rivals as well. If it weren't for Google, Microsoft wouldn't be scrambling trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Google may look like a mess to some people right now, but the Google we see today isn't the finished product. They're still working on it, right now you're just seeing some pieces of the puzzle. The real wonder will be when they start linking everything together. Imagine Google Weather which you can access in Google Earth, which is linked to Google maps and Google Calendar which is all linked to your Google driven GPS which finds you the best route to where you are going given live traffic reports and weather conditions.... etc etc. Google is a monster and if you can't recognize that I'm sorry. I don't claim to know where Google is going, but I'm certain they know what they are doing.

It's funny. When I think about it, I come to the same conclusion. I don't see many innovative applications from google. Still, I feel they changed my life as a user and as a developer of software. Why is that? Just the hype? Maybe that's part of the reason, but there's more.

I think their innovation is on the backend and on the economics side. The way they run their data centers allows them to be extraordinarily generous with the resources they provide to users and developers. They give away resources and they make it easy to reuse them through their APIs. People do these mashup things because they believe it's not just a gimmick that's going to be taken away soon. They think it can last because google can sustain it technically and economically.

Because they are reused, they become a platform provider, not just and applicaton provider. They have put the possibility of cheap, reliable, fast application hosting on everybody's map. Suddenly we can realistically think of mashups that provide critical services to individuals and companies. I'm not aware of any other company who has done that before. Salesforce is the other one that comes to my mind, but in a very different way.

There are some flaws. Just because google give away application and free stuff doesn't means what they doing is innovative. Can you say that all opens-source project is innovative ??

Only the customer can decide whether it is innovative not google. Customer is the benchmark. What the point of being innovative if customer doesn't benefit from it ?? Innovative because of competitor ?? I believe that in some site, you found reference where the founder reprimand the google engineers because of the 20% spend on innovation on own personal project. Why reprimand ? Simple, what they create does not contribute to goal of google. So what the goal of google ? No one knows. It kept secret and the secret helps it to build publicity and keep the share up.

So you can continue to trust Google to be more innovative and secretive. But anyway, the user benefit by getting free stuff for nothing and no harm trusting. Only the investor in google need to be beware.

I think 'fauigerzigerk' has it right.

Innovative is great, fun, and creative. On the other hand, if you can't convince a substantial portion of the world to follow along, then it all crashes and burns.

Anyone remember Magellan? Remember Vines? Improv? Innovative products that went nowhere.

Google has made a number of complicated problems both easy to solve, and cheap too. Even when they don't create the original product, they spot good stuff and acquire it. They they greatly widen the circle of distribution. That's what Microsoft did in many ways early in their history.

Now just take a look at how the industry is responding to Google. Most companies in the industry are trying to come up with a competitive answer that, in some way, does what Google does. The meta-innovation is Google's business model.

Has anyone noticed that more and more TV news shows, when they want to geographically place a story, use Google Earth shots?

Also missing from the article: Writely, and Google Books.