Google's innovations all come from entering new markets and competing with other businesses. GMail competed with HotMail and Yahoo!Mail, Maps competed against MapQuest, Chrome competed against Firefox and IE, Android competes against iOS. Offers competes against Groupon, Wallet competes against Paypal/Square/Stripe. Google products that have not had solid competition (Glass, Wave, Groups, Knol, GoogleBase) or that have competition but don't have the management buy-in and flexibility needed to win against that competition (Orkut, Video, Jaiku, Dodgeball, Buzz, Reader & Blogger in their later years) have not tended to do as well.

Google Search languished for many years (roughly 2004-2009) while Google invented all these other products. Then Bing launched in 2009, and there was a period of rapid innovation from 2009-2011 that gave us Search Options, one unified search across all corpora, 2 visual redesigns, realtime search, Instant, Authorship, Search Plus Your World, and Knowledge/Answer Cards. Then things slowed down again in 2012 when everyone realized Bing was a joke. I personally witnessed - to both my benefit and my detriment - both extremes I mentioned in my original post.

That's a good question.

My guess is that Google is still much too young a company to esperience any of the issues. Maybe once the founders are out for good, and we see more tradtional MBA-style leadership, the traditional illnesses will start emerging too.

Up to now Google has avoided the problem by consistently biting off more than it can chew, landing some borderline-success and improving on from there. This is what they did with search, advertising, book digitalization, online videos, etc. In short, there wasn't much need for internal competition, since they were actively looking for new challenges from the outside.

It's great that they're doing all of this, but I'm curious whether at some point (a few decades from now) they'll eventually decide that all the effort isn't really worth it and focus only on the high-margin stuff.

Really? They seem to have slowed a lot in recent years, and a lot of their most innovative stuff is coming from acquisitions rather than internally. They had some good ideas that kept them better a bit longer (catering, 20% time - which I hear is now much less solid than it once was), but they now look rather like a bigger Cisco.

I'd expect the best people to leave soon or have left already (we already see a lot less enthusiasm about working there than there used to be), and Google to decline like any other big company.

Which innovations would that be?