Google suffering from "permanent Beta" syndrom?
To start of with, let me explain you what I mean by "permanent Beta". This is kind of a state of software project when something is constantly broken or when functionality is being added ad-hock without giving much thought and without any regards to users' expectations. Furthermore, in this state you can expect functionality to disappear randomly.
How exactly does this relate to Google? Well, I believe they've dangerously approached this state. While there services are mostly stable (thanks to great backend architecture) functionality set is quite surprising, lacking at times and inconsistent. Let me give you just a few example that speak for themselves.
Google Calendar while being a great tool can't really replace Outlook or even iCal without such a basic feature as... tasks. For God sake, what kind of a PIM it is without tasks! Instead of adding them in the calendar what do we see? Tasks in GMail. You might disagree, but I don't think they belong in there.
Google Talk is another example. They started of by providing a standalone client and a web interface. Then a flash based client was added. The desktop version looks quite dead now (yeas there is a beta but its more or less same as flash). There doesn't seem any sign of it being ported to any other platforms so its great voice functionality is lost in vane.
I am not gonna keep rumbling much longer but will just mention that Google recently announced that they won't develop Notebook any further.
Overall, I believe Google should stop for a second and have a careful look at the pile of there creations. And start creating a true integrated service out of them. Feature-complete (at least up to the point expected by most users) and consistent!
Unfortunately so far I don't see such tendency, instead they add new experimental and sometime dead-born services like Knol.
Enough negative emotions. I still believe that Google is a fantastic enterprise which does amazing things. They just need to get a bit more mature.
