For once, the controversy isn't because they are ripping somebody else's idea off (though it might seem like they are aping Flikr). After Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped posted a screenshot at the Picassa website, the reaction came fast and furious: GOOGLE! STOP MAKING STUFF!

Seriously, fellas, we're having a tough time keeping up, and it's starting to show. It's what happens when you're starting to feel the pinch to prove you still got some entrepreneurial spirit. You want to keep on innovating; you've made the perfect mousetrap, and you're trying to make it better by changing the color. Even with this week's newest edition, Google Spreadsheets, it's becoming difficult to figure out just what direction Google's taking.

Jason Fried at the 37signals blog asked that very thing, is it all just a rouse?

What if Google was so brilliantly twisted that they're using Writely and Spreadsheet and Calendar and massive numbers of new hires as flares to distract Microsoft (and others)? Shoot up a flare (Spreadsheet) and scare Microsoft into paying even more attention to new attacks from new directions. The flares serve one purpose: to redirect competitors' energy away from focusing on search/ads, which are Google's core competency (and primary revenue source). Hey look over here!!! Is Google the best slight of hand magician around? Is the "Google Office" just a head fake?

It was a question meant to spark creative thought - and boy howdy, did it - but it's not really answering any questions. John Markoff says that Google is trying to be a direct competitor to Excel, while Nicholas Carr calls it an "Office add-on." Pretty much all I know is, it can upload my simple Excel spreadsheets, I can create as complicated a sheet as I generally use, and while I have little need for it, Steve Rubel says it has no search.

It was the piece by Michael Arrington, where he wants Google to get back to making their search technology work, that got me thinking about this in the first place. Paul Kedrosky says Google takes the "nuclear winter approach wherein it ruins markets by freezing them and then cutting revenues to zero." There seems to be dissent in Googleland.

What we can't know, not being insiders at Google, is what moves are yet to come. Will the acquisition of Writely be the first step in creating free online applications for anyone's personal use, or is it a move to get Google in on everybody's computer as an Office-style application, as Microsoft was so successful in doing in the 80s and 90s? All we can be sure of, is that Google isn't going to stop making new products, and Microsoft isn't going to sit, idly by, waiting for their market share to go down.