Does Google Have An Innovation Problem?

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Robert Scoble: Why Google can’t build Instagram: (I was working at Microsoft as Flickr got bought by Yahoo, Skype got bought by eBay, etc etc). ..... Google, internally, knows it has an innovation problem .... is looking to remake its culture internally to help entrepreneurial projects take hold...... how Larry Ellison actually got efficiencies from teams. If a team wasn’t productive, he’d come every couple of weeks and say “let me help you out.” What did he do? He took away another person until the team started shipping and stopped having unproductive meetings. .... At Google you can’t use MySQL and Ruby on Rails .... Google Wave failed, in part, because it couldn’t keep up with the first wave of users and got horribly slow .... Small teams rule

Google is going to fail in the innovation department if it feels like it has to be number one in every emerging trend. On the other hand, it could keep going into new sectors of the economy like it has shown a tendency to do. Google can't beat Facebook on social, but it can beat Facebook and every other web company on wind farms and clean cars.

Facebook's Gmail Killer? Wow

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TechCrunch: Facebook’s Gmail Killer, Project Titan, Is Coming On Monday: @facebook.com email addresses ..... a full-fledged webmail client ..... Facebook has the world’s most popular photos product, the most popular events product, and soon will have a very popular local deals product as well. It can tweak the design of its webmail client to display content from each of these in a seamless fashion (and don’t forget messages from games, or payments via Facebook Credits). And there’s also the social element: Facebook knows who your friends are and how closely you’re connected to them; it can probably do a pretty good job figuring out which personal emails you want to read most and prioritize them accordingly.

Facebook has a huge advantage when it comes to email. Not all people who send you email are equal. And Facebook's social graph lets you determine your social concentric circles. And once you introduce the caste system into your inbox, you are in a much better shape.