Why Google Announcements are Exciting

There’s some buzz today about Google’s imminent launch of a task manager application. This isn’t a really new, or innovative idea, there are a million + 1 options out there in this market space, so why does anyone care?

Oh yeah, because it’s Google. They’re special.

I like Google, don’t get me wrong. I think they’re a great company, and they certainly get all of my search traffic, but I’m far from being a Google fan-boy. Yet, I felt a little excitement about this announcement too. Why is that?

I wondered a while back whether Google has hit that point (size) where new product releases are a long, painful and entirely too complicated process. It seems that innovation has slowed — it doesn’t seem like we’re getting a fast and frenzied stream of new products/features out of Google anymore. Have they become the next Microsoft, where there’s so much bureaucracy that everything is bogged down?

I don’t know. I don’t even know anyone who works as a janitor for Google, let alone someone who works on any of their applications. I do know that a bunch of reasonably high-profile Google employees have jumped ship recently; is it because they’re sick of having innovation crawl at a snail’s pace?

At the same time, I like to think that Google hasn’t become THAT COMPANY that just can’t produce anymore. So I still get excited when something is announced. I’m a little disappointed that all of their products/services seem to be a “me too” lately (c’mon Google App Engine is just a Google-branded version of Amazon S3/EC2). I hope that if the rumours of a Google Task Manager are true, that it brings something new to the table. I can’t for the life of me think or, or suggest what that might be, but I don’t really think the web needs another Ajax-powered to do list, do you?