Chrome: A hell lot of features that are pushing web forward, arguably the best development tools, significant contribution to Webkit (now to Blink), becoming platform for Chrome OS, v8 engine that serves as basis for NodeJs.
App Engine/Drive: So when Heroku/Dropbox does it, it can be called innovation but when GAE/Drive does it, it is just iteration? That's an insane standard to work against.
> doesn't even support formatting other than bold and italic, how's that for retrograde.
There is no way you could argue that supporting lists and headings will suddenly make Google+ an innovative product out of nowhere. What I find awesome are Hangouts and circles. They work very nicely for me, YMMV. You can set the entire profile to be hidden and no one will be smearing contents of your private life anywhere. I am not sure exactly is this complaint coming from.
There are technical innovations, but I thought we were talking about product innovations. Users don't care about WebGL or canvas or CSS3. Those things are not innovations to them.
The only significant user-facing innovation in Chrome is arguably the extension/app store. Maybe incognito browsing, although I believe Safari had that first.
> App Engine/Drive: So when Heroku/Dropbox does it, it can be called innovation
The word "innovate" derives from the Latin name for new. You don't innovate by copying. Heroku (as far as I know) launched a year before Google, and is clearly prior art. Dropbox launched years before.
> There is no way you could argue that supporting lists and headings will suddenly make Google+ an innovative product out of nowhere
I didn't say that. I said that the lack of support for formatting is old-fashioned (the opposite of innovative, really).
I just don't see much happening with other products. Chrome? Just getting slower and more bloated. App Engine? Does nothing for me that Heroku doesn't. Docs, while impressive, came out years ago, and Drive is basically a Dropbox/iCloud clone.
Google actually made a huge reverse-innovation with Google+, which is essentially just Facebook rewritten for the Google ecosystem. It's pretty much as invasive as Facebook in how it attempts to smear the contents of your private life across an impersonal surface, and it seems to belong to another era of walled-garden services that don't integrate with anything other than itself (posts doesn't even support formatting other than bold and italic, how's that for retrograde?).