NY Times on Google’s lack of focus

Saul Hansell of The New York Times examines Google’s current product offerings and feature gaps and comes away a bit puzzled. According to quotes in the article Google goes for the wow factor with stand-alone products that do not integrate well with the work of others. Marissa Mayer says it’s a lot easier to get engineers to spend time developing new features than fill in a feature gap. Sergey Brin says he is now encouraging engineers to develop their ideas as add-ons for existing Google products instead of as stand-alone products.

Former Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider is quoted saying Yahoo! is now too bureaucratic for someone to come up with a game-changing idea and run with it.

My favorite stat: “[O]ver the last year, according to comScore, Yahoo added 11.8 million e-mail users, more than Gmail’s entire user base.”