Think about it, how many products or in how many industries is Google present? It’s insane. What happened with being focused? I believe that is better to be known for something excellent and not for many things mediocre.

For the last couple of years Google has been making new products, some of them very good, some others not so good, so what I’ve been seeing is that those products that haven’t been “so good” is because they are wanting to have as many products as possible, in as many industries as possible, putting QA aside.

Of course I understand their business model. The more products they have, the more people they’ll be able to reach with their advertisements, which is their ONLY source of income. But in the long term, their expansion is not healthy for the market nor for the consumers, nor for themselves.

Let’s list a couple of examples that I can think of:

• There were Groupon, Living social… they created Google Offers, not better, just their own version.
• There were Facebook, Twitter and a bunch of other social networks; they created Buzz, Wave and now Google+.
• There was PayPal, they created Google Checkout, now named Google Wallet.
• There was Flipboard, they created Google Currents.
• There were iOS, Nokia, Samsung… Google created Android.
• There was Yelp, they create Google Places, and even indexed Yelp’s results on their Places service.
• There were iTunes and Amazon Music, they create Google Music.

Now there is ONE common characteristic for all of the previous products. They are OK, but they are not great. They just live because of the power and network of their sponsor: Google. Period.

Of course there are some great products, products that you don’t imagine your life without, products like: Gmail, Search, Maps, and Calendar… But everything has a limit, and as a software/web company, when you start building tools like one to keep track of your Health (Google Health) instead of letting a good company specialized on that topic to build it, you end up failing, as happened with Wave, Buzz, Checkout, and some others.

What about innovation? Of course a company has to innovate to avoid dead, but one thing is innovation (Apple and Amazon are great examples) and other thing is expansion by copying existing products and making them popular using your current Search/indexing leadership.

I believe Google should create new things, reinvent itself, and produce real innovation and changes, and stop creating their own little versions of everything else with Google’s colors.

What do you think? Let me know on your comments.