Somehow, someway, I get a feeling that Google has started to lose some of it’s mojo. It’s stock just took a minor tumble after it failed to meet analysts’ expectations. Which probably means they just made a ridiculous amount of money, rather than really really ridiculous amounts of money. Google Talk is great, but nobody uses it. Google Pack, which was unveiled during CES, is a neat idea but ultimately really not that compelling. I’m not even going to link to Google Pack, that’s how uninteresting it is. Also unveiled at CES, the brand new Google Video store is a complete joke. Never mind the fact that a search based approach to e-commerce will only sell what people already know about, a search for C.S.I. brings up just one episode for purchase, and a bunch of random totally unrelated videos. They also seem to have a truck load of usability problems, so they’d better kick it up a lot of notches if they want any chance of competing with iTunes.

Then there’s the whole censoring results in China. Which I don’t think would’ve been a problem if it were Microsoft or Yahoo doing the censoring (they already do), but because it’s Google, people have been calling them out on it. After all, their company motto is “Do No Evil”, not “Do Less Evil”. A search for Tiananmen in Google China returns all rosy results. But not so for an un-censored search. Ultimately though, I do think Google made the right choice here, it’s least evil option available to them. Not being in China at all is worse imho.

Anyways, I still think Google rocks. Search, Mail, Maps, Blogger, Earth, Picasa… these are all Google apps which are without a doubt awesome and top of their class. But watch out, they might be starting to spread themselves out a little too thin.