There’s Probably No Need To Worry About The Ubiquitous Search Engine Going Anywhere For The Foreseeable Future – After All, People Don’t ’search’ These Days, They ‘Google’ When They Want To Find Something. However, Following On From Yesterday’s Announcement That They Were Pulling The Plug On Wave, It’s Possible To Think That The Steps They Have Taken Into Leading The Cloud-based Medium Could Be A Mistake.

Their instant messaging/ real-time collaboration software was met with cheers and even people waving their laptops in the air when it was announced and beta invites were going for over 40 pounds on eBay, but it didn’t meet with the level of adoption that they were hoping for. Of course, it was always going to have to go head to head with established desktop based software like MSN Messenger and so forth, and whether that’s the point or not, it’s possibly the crux of the issue.

Google dominates search and its Gmail email service is gaining a share of the email market on a daily basis, but Wave turned out to be a massive flop, as did their attempt at tackling Twitter with Buzz. Their Docs software – an online suite of office applications – works well and seems to be reaching some level of acceptance, but it’s hard to imagine that it will beat the established desktop software like MS Office in the long term.

Although Docs has the advantage by its being online based and consequently able to be used anywhere there’s a browser, the wide scale adoption of Dropbox brings a similar, if not greater degree of freedom and functionality. The same can perhaps be said of their forthcoming Chrome OS – an operating system which will be built largely around its browser and all of the necessary software being based online.

Again, it’s highly doubtful that Google will be going anywhere, but with several of their new initiatives falling flat and others trying to change a long-established way of doing things, there might well be a few more failures on the horizon in the not too distant future, especially in the social sphere.