Google is expanding it’s empire. In fact it’s becoming a threat with this big of an influence on public opinion just by being able to effectively “censor” information if they would want to. We need more diversity, IMHO.

With the latest rumors - Google Base - it seems that Google will be attacking new markets soon. Google Base could be a big threat to Craigslist and EBay, actually… (from what I’ve seen of Google Base, I find the phrase “Google wants to host your Databases” overstretches it a bit though…)

So what is Google up to? When is Google starting to sell books?

Google Talk isn’t really big. It seems to be a nice product, but very few people are using it. I’ve never seen Google advertise it, so it’s no wonder most people stick to their established IM/Voice services. But what’s the point of it, when they don’t adequately promote it? And whats behind that VPN service on their planned WiFi network in SF?

Is it about beta testing, maybe?

Google obviously wants to run company intranets. Company intranet search engines are a well-known product, and they for sure would like to expand that offer - offer email service, IM/voice, …

From what I’ve read about their WiFi service, they would be allowed to run e.g. deep packet inspection stuff on it. Combined with Google indexing tech they could test e.g. filtering out pr0n sites. Or test a virus filter. And then offer that product to companies. So is a google firewall coming?

More obvious missing products in Googles portfolio are a document management and a customer relations management solution. Or a combination of both.

Google base might actually be part of an upcoming document management product by Google, I guess. And, I mean, wouldn’t it be obvious for Google to offer a document management (and storage) solution to companies? As for CRM - a google CRM solution combined with their document management and indexing applications would beat any other product: add a user to the CRM and have the related files appear automatically due to google indexing, have the email correspondence added from the company gmail accounts…