Hopefully the leadership shakeup at Google will turn things around.

That strategy doesn't work with social, though. They can rip off an idea and build a more technically sound product, but social needs more than just a good product, and google can't deliver.

I still think you need to have people on the ground. And lots of them. As a small aside, I work for a Groupon-clone website in a non-US market. I've built a very nice Internet-based redemption interface for the business owners to check the clients' coupons. Guess what? ~75% of them don't even have Internet at the POS, they print their coupon lists at a home computer and somehow manage all the clients we send them manually. We also manually create accounts for about half of them, because, apparently, creating an user account on our Drupal-based website is too damn difficult.

Maybe this time is different, and all the tech-savy small-business owners from out-there will go directly into Google's arms. I personally doubt it.

Big overlay on google maps: "Get 0.5% off your total bill at Joe's Pancake House when you order at least sixteen pancakes!"

PS. Man, I feel like pancakes now

Open up Maps, hit the 'Find Places' button, and pick Restaurants, for example. There's a sponsored, very generic link for Groupon here; Google could do one better by adding a little 'offers available' symbol beside some of the restaurants.

Because most companies don't believe that trying to expand into another area will significantly hurt them in areas they already excel at.

Similarly, Cisco buying Groupon increases perimeter to surface area far more than Google buying Admob.

And to quote Eric Schmidt: "The last new idea in computer science was public key encryption in 1975"

It's the implementation of an idea that sets it apart.

Some amount of copy-catting is certainly necessary and healthy to push horizons and to help competition keep things fresh. But that doesn't mean all copying is benign and healthful. Copying can certainly be tacky.

Most people seem to agree that some large companies copy not because they have something genuinely worthy of merit to bring to the table, but simply because they are very large, and can leverage some of the advantages of that largeness to horn in on the market. You can be certain that in these cases, said large companies will make the case that their differentiations are worthy, but that doesn't automatically make it so.

Schmidt's quotation is roughly true, obviously. But it's also something that you'd say to a group of people you wanted to motivate to continue to perform well even though some of the crew is growing restless. Many high performers would rather attempt visionary and trailblazing products rather than work on another boring me-too project.