Dubbed by some as the Battle of the Century, Google’s Chrome is already picking up heat waves from analysts, technologists and enthusiasts alike.

Google has departed from its mission of “organizing world’s information” and started doing things that would give them a market share of commoditized businesses — like Gtalk, Android, Chrome (the browser) and now Chrome (the OS)

In this age of innovation and competition, one would expect new entrants compete with the incumbents from the get-go. The market is not tolerant to waiting for niche products to go through their innovation cycle.

When the ICQs and Yahoo Messengers of the world were far ahead in terms of maturity in their products, Google launched Gtalk with the primary USP being it would be client-less. Later Google bit the bullet with a client-enabled version and added voice and video capabilities years after the big guys did.

Android was somewhat of a unfocused product. They started off saying it will run on any hardware, but ended up tying up with HTC for hardware and T-Mobile for the service. The G1 looks Neanderthal. It is going to be several years before they match the competition in terms of functionality, usability and end-user experience.

Chrome was a good product, but did not offer anything the other guys did not. Tabbed browsing, searching from the URL bar, maximizing usable (window) area are all things competition was already doing or released immediately after Chrome did. I have yet to see the difference in how Chrome utilizes memory better than their competition. End result: they have not even come close to giving IE or Firefox a run for their money.

Now it is Chrome, the OS. You might have seen when Chrome got Sep 1 2008 when I blogged that Google will soon to hit the OS market. Now we have started hearing rumors about Chrome as the next desktop OS and later clarified that it will be a NetBook OS, not a desktop OS. I will wait to see what Chrome has to offer, but I’d have to guess that it is going to be similar to Android/Talk in terms of evolution.

All this to say that Google’s strategies are somewhat inconsistent with their mission and they are not learning from their mistakes. Google just cannot afford to start their life from 1995 when others are making products for 2015.

Here’s my indexed version of where Google is going:

PS:

1) All opinions are my own

2) The exhibit is my work product (and therefore my opinion) and is relative