I took the overly sensational title as a warning flag and I was right. The article seems to take weak premises and then founds size-able claims on them.<p>For example:<p>"Meanwhile, Apple may obviate the need for Google altogether with Siri as it introduced a radical new way to handle search on a mobile device (and with the majority of Google mobile searches coming from iOS devices, the search giant has to worry about this intrusion)."<p>That Siri utterly kills the need for Google on a mobile device (not even on iPhones, on mobile devices) is complete lunacy. Not to mention that Siri is not a radical way to handle search. Voice search has been around for a while--see Vlingo and Google Voice Commands.<p>The rest of the article is just as bad about making tall claims with weak evidence.<p>Another quote:
"Meanwhile, Google will continue making large amounts of money (probably billions) on its current offering but may find it hard to show the general public how it is relevant today."<p>Let's analyse a typical day in my life. (Although I will add, that I don't think this behavior is limited to power users, but I'm sure plenty of non-geek users share similar behavior.)<p>Wake up and check gmail.
Use my Android phone to track my bike to work
Check Google calendar for any appointments
Look up a good barbershop on Google Maps after work
Video chat with my mom using google chat at night<p>Maybe the article is right...Google is so irrelevant.<p>Edit: Wanted to add a link re: the article's last point
<a href="http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/14/google-earnings-q3/" rel="nofollow">http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/14/google-earnings-q3/</a>
Having worked at Microsoft (which I pretty much only have nice things to say about - it was a great environment in many ways) and now being at Google, I have to say that they feel very very different. I feel like I have far more ability to make things happen/be creative/take initiative at Google; admittedly, I happen to be on a new, small team, but I don't think my experience is <i>that</i> unusual.