My issue of Playboy came in the mail so I got to read the the infamous Google interview. If you don't have a Playboy subscription or balk at buying the magazine from the newstands you can get the interview from Google's amended SEC filings. I didn't read the entire interview but there were no surprises in what I read.

I was recently talking to a coworker who's on the fence about whether to go to Google or stay at Microsoft and it was interesting talking about the pros and cons of both companies. As we talked Google began to remind me of Netscape in its heyday. A company full of bright, young guys who've built a killer application for the World Wide Web and is headed for a monster IPO. The question is whether Google will squander their lead like Netscape did (Yes, I realize my current employer may have had something to do with that) or whether they'll be the next Yahoo!

There are a couple of things Google has done over the past few years that have made me wonder whether the company has enough adult supervision and business acumen to rise above being a one trick pony in the constantly changing Internet landscape. Some of them are touched on by Larry and Sergey in their interview

1. http://www.google.com is non-sticky: Nothing on the main Google site encourages the user to hang around the site or even return to the website besides the quality of the search results. According to the company's founders this is by design. The problem with this reasoning is that if and when its competitors such as MSN Search and Yahoo! Search get good enough there isn't anything keeping people tied to the site. It seems unfathomable now but there was a time that it seemed unfathomable that anyone would use anything besides AltaVista or Excite to search the Web. It's happened before and it can happen again. Google seems ill-prepared for this occurence.

2. Inability to tie together disparate offerings: The one thing that has separated Yahoo! from all the Web portals that were all the rage a couple of years ago is that it managed to tie its many offerings into a single cohesive package with multiple revenue streams. The Yahoo! experience seamlessly ties in My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Groups (formerly eGroups), Yahoo! Calendar, Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! Messenger and the Yahoo! Companion. I use most of these Yahoo sites and tools on a daily basis and use all of them at least once a month. Besides advertising related to search there are several entry points for Yahoo! to get revenue from me.

   Compare this to Google which although has a number of other offerings available from the Google website has a number of offerings they haven't figured out how to make synergistic such as their purchase of Blogger or sites like Orkut. Yahoo! would have gotten a lot more mileage out of either site than Google currently has done. Another aspect of this issue is gleaned from this excerpt from a post by Dave Winer entitled Contact with Google

   Another note, I now have four different logins at Google: Orkut, AdSense, Blogger and Gmail. Each with a different username and password. Now here's an area where Google could be a leader, provide an alternative to Passport, something we really need, a Google-size problem.

   Yahoo! has a significantly larger number of distinct offerings yet I access all of them through a single login. This lack of cohesiveness indicates that either there isn't a unified vision as to how to unite this properties under a single banner or Google has been unable to figure out how to do so.

3. GMail announced to quickly: Google announced GMail with its strongest selling point being that it gave you 100 times more space than competing free email services. However GMail is still in beta and not available to the general public while it's competitors such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail have announced upping their limits to 250MB and 100MB respectively with gigabytes of storage available and other features available to users for additional fees. This has basically stolen Google's thunder and halted a potential exodus of users from competing services while GMail isn't even out of beta yet.

4. Heavy handed tactics in the Web syndication standards world: Recently Google decided to use a interim draft of a technology specification instead of a de facto industry standard for syndicating content from their Blogger website thus forcing users to upgrade or change their news aggregators as well as ensuring that there would be at least two versions of the Atom syndication format in the wild (the final version and the interim version supported by Google). This behavior upset a lot of users and aggregator developers. In fact, the author of the draft specification of the Atom syndication format that Google supported over RSS has also expressed dismay at the choice Google made and is encouraging others not to repeat their actions.

All of these are examples of less than stellar decision making at Google. Even though in previous entries such as What Is Google Building? and What is Google Building II: Thin Client vs. Rich Client vs. Smart Client I've implied that Google may be on the verge of a software move so bold it could upstage Microsoft the same way Netscape planned to with the browser upstaging the operating system as a development and user platform, it isn't a slam dunk that they have what it takes to get there.

It will be interesting watching the Google saga unfold.