Updated: News Analysis: Has Google lost its magic touch? Google Video, the latest from the search giant, gets a decidedly thumbs down rating from the critics.There's a growing consensus that Google Inc. has, as one critic recently put it, "lost its magic pixie dust" when it comes to creating cutting-edge features.
The latest example of a clunker is Google Video, a video download store that Google unveiled with much fanfare last week, but has since been soundly panned by some of Google's biggest supporters.
With each one of the negative reviews, many surfacing on Tuesday, is the notion that Google Video isn't just a one-time miss. Rather, critics say, it's one of a growing number of recent failures suggesting that Google's usual Midas Touch is missing in action, and that should worry Google as well as its investors and those who rely on its products at home or work.
"For some reason, people keep expecting Google to do something earth-shatteringly iPod-like, completely transforming the way people think about the company," writes Andrew Goodman at Traffick, a search engine blog. "Do they have it in them? Maybe, but the new Google Video store certainly isn't it."
Read more here about new Google features.
Ordinary products, let alone clunkers, are not what Googleites are used to. The leading Internet search destination has been on a decade-long streak of introducing jaw-droppingly unique features soon adopted by its competitors.
It's first innovation was its uncluttered search engine that was easy to use, which was a novel look and feel at the time.
Market-shaking features poured out of Google Labs like water from a fountain over the next decade. It seemed that almost on a weekly basis, there would be a new feature like AdSense, the revolutionary Google system for placing ads on Web sites, or Google Maps, with its unique way of maneuvering around a online map copied by others.
But in the last year or so have come some ordinary or even bad features. Some technologists suggest Google began losing its edge last year when in unveiled Google Talk, its instant messaging feature.
Read the rest of this eWEEK story: "Google Video Is Not So Eye-Catching"
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