Why are so many people expecting this to be a "killer" when they have failed to gain much traction with their other attempts to compete with Facebook/Twitter. I don't know many people using Orkut, Wave, Buzz, Picasa, etc.
To be fair though, iPod and iPhone did play a big role to give Apple the "coolness" as a whole, perhaps that's the right strategy - attack from the sidelines.
* An Intel chip means that I can run Linux on it and still have access to closed-source programs (Flash, Matlab, etc).
* An Intel chip makes it possible to boot Windows natively.
* An Intel chip makes it easier for Apple to maintain forward momentum without needing to goad Motorola/IBM/etc to improve their PowerPC offerings to be competitive with Intel/AMD chips.
Well, that is definitely a good reason to wish that Google will take over social networking…
I am happy with Apple being strong in iPod/iPhone because they are weak in PCs. And I am happy with Google being strong in search, and Facebook and Twitter having the social network market.
If we got a Facebook killer from Twitter I'd love it. But from Google? I think they got enough fingers in enough pies for the time being. :)
So if they ran something like Facebook it would be much easier to compete with them outside of their ecosystem, unlike Facebook which tries to dominate all data submitted into their system.
Same goes with Google releasing a bazillion products.
It's more like MS. We all remember how badly Bob and those new phones failed. But they went from 0-to-success on the gaming console market, and they did it by capitalizing on their already-successful product ("Hey windows developers, click here to compile your existing game for xbox 360!")
What other Google products turn a profit?
Is YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, Android not successful?
All these products has very large user adoption and Google is earning money with the help of adsense/doubleclick/AdMob.
I don't know about gmail specifically, but gmail which is part of Google Enterprise solution is "very" profitable as a unit.
You have to look at it this way. All Google's product and services are inter-connected. Unlike tradition software company like MSFT, google doesn't build products for the sole purpose of making profit from start. They make products, and they iterate and years from now if it reaches a tipping point they will start making money off of it. Most of google products are depended on each other's success. So saying things like "Is x product for Google profitable?" is a tricky question.
I am sure they have their separate internal account for each products (or maybe not), but as long as each product drives revenue to its profitable product, but individually not profitable; it makes no difference AFA google is concerned.