Wow, what a one sided piece. the flops from google: "Buzz, Wave, Google TV, and the Nexus One". As Paul Buchheit points out,
"They take big risks. People often point to projects such as Wave as evidence that Google has "lost its magic" or something. To me, it's evidence that they are still willing to take risks on new ideas and new ways of doing things (Wave was run as a completely autonomous project in Australia). If everything you do works, then you're not taking many risks and probably aren't innovating either. Obviously, if everything you do fails, that's not good either, but there's a sweet-spot somewhere in the middle. Google has enough big successes, such as Chrome and Android, to show that they are somewhere near that sweet-spot"
It's not that google doesn't have problems, but with every possible negative issue piled on in such a one sided manner, it seems more FUD than any sort of earnest critique.
I agree with you, some of those projects are way to new to be considered failures (Buzz, Google TV). They might be but I find it premature to call them that. As for the Nexus One, it wasn't selling like the iPhone but I know of a few who did get one, but in the end how many iPhones were purchased online? The best part is that other Android phones tried to match it's spec once it came out, no need to call that a failure.
The only argument I can agree with in the post was about the relation Google has with devs and users. Sometimes they do release stuff and then it seems they forget about them. But I think most of the time that's just lack of time by the people working on those projects, they try to add features and move forward and that's always a tradeoff with maintaining whats there and developing relations with devs/users.
Writing off Google TV is probably like writing off the T-Mobile G1. For god's sake they haven't even brought the Android Market and SDK to it yet (originally scheduled for sometime in H1,2011).
I think you're being too hard on the piece. You picked one sentence out of the article and are dismissing the point completely on that basis. But he wasn't offering those 4 products as his only justification. He quoted several articles that supported his point from high profile people in the technology industry who are thinking the same thing.
The author has sensed what many have sensed lately which is that Google is struggling to conquer new markets while having difficulties with its powerhouse products (namely the Search Engine and AdSense). His thought process than went from there and his points weren't invalid ones.
I think people are putting too much into TechCrunch being owned by AOL (hence the FUD claim). This guy isn't a regular TechCrunch contributor nor is he an AOL employee (see profile here: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rezendi).
"They take big risks. People often point to projects such as Wave as evidence that Google has "lost its magic" or something. To me, it's evidence that they are still willing to take risks on new ideas and new ways of doing things (Wave was run as a completely autonomous project in Australia). If everything you do works, then you're not taking many risks and probably aren't innovating either. Obviously, if everything you do fails, that's not good either, but there's a sweet-spot somewhere in the middle. Google has enough big successes, such as Chrome and Android, to show that they are somewhere near that sweet-spot"
It's not that google doesn't have problems, but with every possible negative issue piled on in such a one sided manner, it seems more FUD than any sort of earnest critique.