Infoworld doesn’t think Google is innovating:

Perhaps, like Microsoft, [Google] will find that some innovation doesn’t come from Stanford PhDs. Because, at its core, the best innovation solves human needs, and not many humans are engineers. It may be time for Google to start “scratching” a wider variety of “itches.”

Weblog

I tend to agree. Matt writes on the “Google Fetish”:

Little Oddpost has done more for email than Google ever will with Gmail, whose only claim to fame is the size of its storage (which is nothing more than an invitation to people to give Google more to index, search, and advertise against). Apple reigns supreme in photo editing and sharing. (Ever used .Mac? Life could not be any easier.) And so on. Google routinely fails beyond its core domain.

In my opinion, the Google services that stink, at this moment, right now, compared to the competition (not old 5-10 year old comparisons) are Orkut and Search. These two failures are even currently doing harm to the world. Yes, search. Yahoo search has them beat, which I’ve noted before. Orkut is easily beaten by Facebook and LinkedIn. Heck, even lots of Google employees use LinkedIn. I think Orkut has really made the world worse off, especially with its incredible popularity due mainly to its affiliation to Google, not anything notable about the service itself.