Google ... where did all the innovation go?

Google has been hard at work in it's application developments recently. We had Google Health, then Lively and now Chrome. Google Earth was innovation, as was Google Health. My concern is that Lively, and now Chrome are Google essentially reiterating existing applications, with no obvious sign of the innovation or insight that I'd expect them to display.

Both Lively and Chrome add new applications into already heavily populated application genres. From a marketing perspective I'm struggling to see the real UPS, from a perspective of differentiation, producing applications into competitive genres - Virtual Worlds and Browsers both seeing a lot of growth over the last couple of years - effectively dilutes Google's presence, unless they can launch what becomes the leader in both of these genres. And that is no mean feat.

This is the thing that seems to be lacking from Google at the moment (and the thing that would make some sense of this sporadic application development) is a public statement of Google's view of th future of the Internet, it's service and application provision, and how that will fit into our personal and professional use of computers and the internet.

Then just as I finish writing this I see Dennis Howletts Post on the Google Chrome ELUA over at ZDNet and I can't believe that they actually think that this is acceptable behavior.

Oh, and at the point Chrome launched, Google's own plug-in for Lively didn't work. The there's the DoS vulnerability.

Google: time to sort it out and lead the future of the internet rather than seeming to treat your applications development with a lack-lustre attitude, and your end users with a significant amount of contempt.