Can Google Stay Relevant?

I can't help but wonder what the news of Larry Page taking back the reins mean for Google. Unlike Apple when Jobs return in 1996, Google is still minting money by the boatloads. However, I wonder how many people in the industry still look to Google as an innovation powerhouse.

I'm still a happy gmail user and can still remember switching over from my Y!mail account. Gmail was definitely a couple steps ahead of its competitors at that point. My big Google hope, however, was for Wave. When word got out that a tiger team at Google was attempting to re-imagine email given everything we had learned in the last 15 years, I was hounding friends over at the GooglePlex for an early invite. While Wave was definitely fun to play around with, the half-hearted attempt at rollout and poor integration with Gmail probably doomed the product. Furthermore, Wave had pretty much completely missed the social train. Little surprise that the project got canned and the technology got "reabsorbed" into Google proper.

But there hasn't been a big innovation hurrah out of Google since. Buzz did not re-imagining anything. Its features are incremental and, as a result, it hasn't made a peep in the roaring social party. But the worse offense is this latest news of a Google "Offers" Groupon clone.

The pitch sheet for "Offers" that got leaked to the media describes a product that hardly brings anything new to the market. True, they offer to run ads on the display network, but that was a pretty obvious next-step for Groupon and LivingSocial in order to broaden their bases. But what surprised (and disappointed) me the most is that Google is offering local merchants the same broken economics that Groupon is peddling. As a leader in both advertising and technology, Google should definitely be attacking Groupon's Achilles heel by creating a marketing management framework for local merchants that actually makes financial sense. And it doesn't end there. The timing for leaking this news is abysmal! If the strategy or M&A folks over at the GooglePlex had leaked this document a couple weeks before talking to Groupon, they would have had a bit more strength at the negotiation table and, failing that, would have at least thrown some cold water onto their competitor's fund-raising. It didn't even require writing a single line of software. Just the 2-page pdf was enough.

Getting the "Offers" news out so strategically late really calls to mind Google's stumbles in the last couple years. Maybe Page taking direct control will give the team a boost. But since I didn't have the impression that Larry and Sergey had been marginalized by Eric, I'm not expecting a significant change. I'd hate to be the first to ask whether Google will remain relevant in the years to come. I couldn't help but cringe on hearing Carol Bartz talk about making Yahoo relevant. Apparently, when a company is mentioned in the same sentence as the word "relevant", irrelevance might not be too far off.