Disproving a negative is very difficult (ie your comment To prove my point please name one product that Google created and introduced (not copied or purchased) in the last year that is truly trans-formative to the user experience AND has been adopted widely by the targeted audience.

I would challenge you to show me any truly transformative website that has rolled out in the last year that has been widely adopted. Any and all successes are incremental. Google is just by a different standard than most and bring many competitive advantages to that playground. But as my father says, if you have potatoes, you make potato soup. It may not be an original recipe but if they make enough of it, they still are doing what stock holders want.

My point does not diminish the fact that many people are now realizing that they are behaving and will continue to behave like every other shameless corporation on the planet. That is disturbing to many that held the belief that they are somehow better/different/less evil…. they are none of those things… no less or more moral than any corporation..

I have been arguing for years that they will be held to the same measure as any other corporation and in the end, the only thing that matters is profit. Welcome to America in the new millenium. That may disappoint some, but it is reality. Only the end of capitalism will change this, not whether Google is sued under antitrust or brought to heal by Facebook.

@Stan

Schemer may be doing but not through the Places dashboard…. that coupon integration is still “coming soon”. Thanks for the invite, invite.

There is no chicken/ egg problem if there is real demand for a product. Build it and they will come comes to mind (especially when you have a billion plus users). Google’s copycat Plus product does not address a need of the marketplace and does not, effectively, beat an alternative product (Facebook).

The problem with Google is that their business model, now, is predicated on building products that copy competitors with the caveat that Google does not want to hire the people necessary to make their product work. In the end the user is left with something that works pretty good but has no real customer support should something go wrong.

In writing the above I realized that in recent months I, personally, have become very anti-Google in my rhetoric. Thinking it through I believe this comes from an underlying unease with the way Google runs their business. To me it seems they have crossed an invisible line into shameless corporate behemoth that does not create new and interesting products. Instead they use their clout to copy upstarts, dilute the market, and leave the audience with a mediocre product. To prove my point please name one product that Google created and introduced (not copied or purchased) in the last year that is truly trans-formative to the user experience AND has been adopted widely by the targeted audience.

The constraining problem is probably not complexity (although that is a concern) but the chicken/egg issue of getting users/businesses to use Plus.