Give Google marks for trying!

Google is one profitable, and energetic company.

It is sweetly rich, and it has web search completely sown up; leastways outside China. It throws off $$$ every time a web surfer clicks on an ad. Moreover, Google is growing that sector everyday, even making new acquisitions in advertising, including the recent AdMob purchase to extend it’s lead into the mobile ad space.

Google is a formidable company.

Google keeps (Microsoft’s) Steve Ballmer up nights, up there in Redmond.

Google keeps (Apple’s) Steve Jobs up nights, close by in Cupertino.

Google, however, is a one-trick pony.

For real.

Google is a one-trick pony!

It does try, with a myriad number of initiatives, to extend its profitable businesses, all to no avail, currently.

To wit: Android, Google Search Appliance, GMail, YouTube, Blogger.com, Picasa, Reader, Maps, Earth, Desktop, Alerts and a search engine*. Pretty impressive, right?

Actually, NOT!

From a business standpoint, only search is profitable. The others are initiatives that have gotten a lot of buzz – pun intended – from the tech cognoscenti, but have failed woefully in the eyes of the constituency that matters: the users.

Enter Google Wave.

For a while now, Google has been hawking Google Apps, the supposed ‘Microsoft Office killer’. As all sentient members of our race know, the Google Apps phenomenon is one of those virtual ones, a phenomenon only in the minds of the tech press, since the Apps have gotten almost no traction in the real world, with Google’s signature accounts reverting to Microsoft Office.

Earlier this year, Google released Google Wave, a web-based competitor to Microsoft SharePoint.

The initial reviews, from those logrollers in the IT press was, wow, a  new thing. A winner. Cooler heads prevailed, and called it what it was, a less-than-worthy rival to the King. After a cursory look at it, in a VM of course, I declared it stillborn, and a potential failure.

Last week, Google decided to follow my advice and end Wave’s misery.

Can you imagine the distress of those ‘partners’ that have bet their fortunes on that dog?

The bottom line is this: when evaluating software or services for your company, do test for the actual needs of you company, and do not listen to yum-yums who don’t have a clue.

Another PSA: with Google products, be most vigilant, as the breathless, fawning reviews you will read online have no bearing to your businesses.

“To be forewarned is to be forearmed.”

Google is a one-trick pony.

You have been warned!

* Thanks to Rick Vanover for this partial list of Google initiatives/businesses.