Nick Carr notes that Google's "spaghetti strategy" hasn't been well received internally, either:

Brin has been particularly blunt. In early October of this year, the Los Angeles Times reported that "Sergey Brin is leading a companywide initiative called 'Features, not products.' [Brin] said the campaign started this summer when Google executives realized that myriad product releases were confusing their users. 'It's worse than that,' said Brin, Google's president of technology. 'It's that I was getting lost in the sheer volume of the products that we were releasing.'" The article also quoted Schmidt, who said of Brin's effort, "That is a big change in the way we run the company."

I suspect that the "20% time" thing - whereby the developers spend up to 20% of their time on pet projects - has a lot to do with the scattershot product strategy. I suspect that it also has a lot to do with some of the products that have been completely neglected (splog magnet Blogger, anyone?).

More than anything else, they need focus. The ad business is doing really well for them, but it's masking a whole host of other problems.

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