Can Google Be All Things Internet To All People?

Reading the announcement today about Google offering a television search service as well as the story that they had hired away a key FireFox programmer and are rumored to be entering the browser space, I realized that even the people working there must have a hard time keeping track of what all they are doing. Gmail, Desktop Search, Picasa, Froogle, Google Groups, Google Answers, News search, Google Local, Blogger, and the list goes on. And that doesn't even cover what they list in their Google labs projects. One has to wonder if there is any area they aren't going to pursue.

It's exciting to see them being so ambitious and going after areas that are ripe for innovation (competition has been sorely needed - witness the skimpy amount of webmail space Yahoo offered with free email accounts until Google forced them to be more competitive). But I have to wonder if they will be able to continue taking on so many areas and at the same time be able to leverage their efforts strategically across all of the product lines. Will it all come together as a coherent set of offerings that leverage a similar user experience and take advantage of core underlying technologies in an efficient manner? It should be interesting to watch as they continue to race forward...

Stealth Startup Emerges

I got an email from an old Apple colleague of mine named Mark "The Red" Harlan the other day. He and fellow Apple alum Chris Derossi have been working on a stealth project for several years now and are about to take the wraps off of it. It's an online poker site that sounds like it is going to give the current sites a run for their money. Mark claims it will be "The world's best online poker website. Period."

Their main website is at www.gamesgrid.com - there are already other online games there, and the poker section will be up and running shortly. They've also written a book to promote the site and teach people how to play: "Winning at Internet Poker For Dummies" - available on Amazon.com.

By the way, they are looking for beta testers if you want to give it a try:

http://koa.gamesgrid.com/beta/beta_app.php


Posted by Brian Lawley