The Google Fetish

So, I like Google. I know that Google is true. Larry and Sergey don't worship the devil - they do no evil.

Enough? Good.

I get tired of the cultish Google following. Google has done a **fantastic** job delivering search that works efficiently, reliably, and with a minimum of clutter (ads and such). But Google has failed to do much more. At its foundation, the Google culture is an engineering culture, and there is a somewhat limited range of purely technical tasks that they can take on and master.

Photo sharing? Picassa is weak. Orkut? Nope, LinkedIn has them beat. Gmail? Please. The UI might as well be DOS and the functionality is not much better.

Google is the king of search. That's a major accomplishment, and we should applaud them for it. But let's not get carried away by letting that success bleed over into other areas where they've demonstrated much less expertise and foresight.

Little Oddpost has done more for email than Google ever will with Gmail, whose only claim to fame is the size of its storage (which is nothing more than an invitation to people to give Google more to index, search, and advertise against). Apple reigns supreme in photo editing and sharing. (Ever used .Mac? Life could not be any easier.) And so on. Google routinely fails beyond its core domain.