Google's shift of focus?

Its about time that I dedicated an entire article to Google (people I know would say that its rather late). Google entered the search engine space quietly. Yahoo! was the de-facto search engine (well it was more a web directory anyway). Google promised productivity from the word 'Search' - the homepage was plain and loaded quickly, search results were served in a flash, snippets of text from search results helped flush out false positives. Advanced search options remained hidden away.

Google then shifted its focus towards power users and corporate users. It launched tools such as Search APIs, Groups, News, Scholar, Special searches, GMail (... the list goes on) for users that needed to do more than searching.

Lately, however, Google's target segment seems to be the everyman. Its latest tools are nothing to write home about. Particularly, I am talking about Blogger, Pages and Finance.

I tried hosting this blog on Blogger, but soon realized that Blogger did not offer much in terms of features. I could write my 20 odd lines, but that's about it. Granted, it let me customize my template, but this wasn't very easy (it took me some time to figure out the template code). All this just for appearance. I really doubt that many Blogger users play around with the template anyway.

My experience with Google Pages lasted all of 15 minutes. I haven't returned since. Google Pages is your basic web page hosting service. The tools offered let you resize and recolor text, add images, and some other forgettable operations. You can't create a page that would impress *anyone*. In fact, the whole service seems more to be just another Google experiment in AJAX. There is, of course, the 100 MB storage space that will attract users.

Google re-invented the wheel with Finance. The only feature worth mentioning is the draggable listings (which is quite cool, IMHO). All the information, however, is available at other websites.

According to a friend of mine, Google's strategy is quite clear. Power users may appraise and praise Google's products, but that's not where the money lies. Therefore, Google is now targeting us John and Jane Doe's that browse the Internet for information and entertainment. When we see a relevant advertisement alongside something we are reading, we invariably click on it. That is how Google makes money.

Does this mean that all future Google services will be for the common man? My guess is that Google does have a couple of aces up its sleeve. After all, Google is the company that gave us Google Earth.