From the article:

The company seems unsure about how to move beyond the core search business that has brought it such massive success. Google has placed expensive bets on acquisitions, chief among them its $1.6 billion purchase of YouTube, a $3.1 billion wager on ad network DoubleClick, and more recently its $750 million purchase of mobile advertising platform AdMob. But none of those deals have yet significantly diversified Google's $23-billion-a-year revenue stream: Google's main focus continues to be driving people back to the search box and the ad dollars that Google collects for helping marketers reach highly targeted consumers. Even Google's most successful new product, the Android operating system for smartphones, generates scant revenue for the company: Google gives the licenses free to mobile-phone operators to facilitate, you guessed it, searches and use of other Google services on mobile phones. And while it lets its whip-smart engineers dedicate a portion of their workdays to dreaming up the coolest products for the web, all that Googley experimentation hasn't had a huge impact on the bottom line.

Apparently Google's biggest downfall is the mobile and social web experience. They need to move beyond search if they want to keep up with the world's biggest technology company " Apple. "Google is not the hot company anymore," says Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. "Their stock has been mostly flat for five or six years now. How can you claim to be a leader with equity performance like that? That's starting to look like Microsoft or Yahoo. They have to get into some other place, and quickly."

A thread at Webmaster World has been discussing the article and most forum members aren't happy. Many can't believe that anyone would write such an absurd article and I have to tend to agree with them.

While there are some points of merit in the article, Google is still one of the most profitable companies with some of the brightest minds in the business. I really can't see its employees and shareholders sitting back and waiting for the end to come. No doubt they have something special up there sleeve to advance into new areas of the web, they're just keeping it a secret from us!

What do you think about the article? Feel free to share your thoughts below.