in select copies of the new chili peppers album is a small sticker that warns, “please note, this sounds like a lotta shit that we’ve already done, sorry“…does it matter? a zillion people are still gonna buy it because they’re fans, and this is exactly what’s going on with elgoog…when i saw all the crap coming out of elgoog press day, what really stood out was this photo that ran in usa today in which sergio and barry looked like they’d been out until 4 am the night before at a crazy barmitzvah evening party and had just rolled in to announce some new buttons and doodads…

what the shit? in a matter of weeks microsoft rolls out a new version of their academic search, a rockin’ new version of explorer, yahoo fires a torpedo at cnet with their tech portal, sun appoints the second uber tech exec with a giant pony tail (yeah, gateway dude was the first) - and people are actually writing about how elgoog finally put a fucking ‘delete‘ button inside gmail? come on…

…elgoog continues to innovate only through acquisition - am i the only person who sees this? what have they actually made themselves in the past year that really matters? press day comes and goes, and all we see is some shit that looks like what netsnippets has been doing better for years (upcoming notes tool), a trends bar that’s just a new view on the old zeitgeist, some other crap i can’t even remember and then this other assatronic (new word!) thing called co-op…it’s like they had a meeting and decided to not embrace open community tagging (fine with me, honestly) and instead chose to introduce a new esoteric information reliability standard that makes sense to about 2 percent of their users with a link right there on the home page (nice fucking job maria mayer, how’d that get by you?)…

you know what? nothing. that’s exactly what i’m expecting from elgoog this year…no interest in creating new streams of real substantial revenue, no genuinely original features (their biggest plays in online payments and expanding elgoog base look very ‘me too’ and unoriginal)…my honest advice to this company is to focus on buying a company (next time) that actually lets you do something groundbreaking, like when microsoft bought forte and created powerpoint and rolled out an office suite, that was brilliant…or when yahoo bought overture and changed the face of online advertising overnight….but buying up an online word processor and rolling it up with a half-baked calendar and a mail app that’s still called beta software, and tying into a bunch of other crap that nobody really uses (namely groups, personal elgoogpages etc)? really, you’re putting users to sleep…

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