[cosus]

Google has yet created a product that has produced a revenue stream beyond search. Their current strategy reminds me of Cisco, purchasing companies inorder to increase revenue, however nothing they have yet purchased, drone writely to grandcentral to that software encryption software has increased anything other than their Internet presence. Organically they haven't produced much other than orkut or Gmail and neither are champions of industry. Yahoo remains to have the most visited site and most active e-mail base. Other than gears and android, they haven't produced a viable product. the books project they implemented, while sound at first glance is very anti competitive. Even yahoo at this point is creating an open source distributed system. Now with their purchase of the mobile ad service we finally see why Android was produced. Really though, a company as large as google producing products with no forseable revenue sounds anti-competive.

I'm just wondering if at this point google is more of obstacle to innovation with everything being "free". Garmin and TomTom stocks plummeted on google's new navigation. Google did make a generation where "free" actually means free, but with such cutthoat prices, how can anyone compete?

Microsoft forced the browser to be free and look where that led. A temporary end to all competition. I just at times can see google going the same direction. Though, zoho office has a much superior UI to google docs, but they don't intend to be entirely "free".