There's also something to be said for a good, clean, uncluttered,, lightweight search site. Think back to 1999 when Google started to rear its head early on. It was JUST a big Google logo and a bar. It was trying to compete with search engines of the time like Excite, WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves, etc. I think people forget just how crowded, hot and crazy the search engine business used to be. Google won out MAINLY because it was uncluttered and clean. Excite used to look a LOT like today's 'iGoogle' interface with all those drag+droppable widgets and features. But people really preferred the sleeker and cleaner Google searches, where the ads weren't laden in graphics, Flash and RealPlayer content. They were TEXT BASED ADS. It just worked.

Didn't they already do that? Orkut? By my opinion, if they already did it and they're simply giving it a much-needed facelift and a new name, I'm not sure I'd wager that they're spreading thin. More importantly, they're not even showing signs of spreading thin yet. They have huge successes with relatively minor-impact failures (like Google Wave, Google Buzz, etc.. it's not hurting them that it's failing/failed).

Again, by my opinion, Nokia by contrast has decided to make cellular phones their main business and they're trending toward failure in that... while tragically missing the boat on a market segment that they almost could have taken credit for creating, or at least leading, a few years ago in the Internet Tablets. Nokia isn't spreading thin either... they're just casually expunging all the things they were doing right and concentrating on doing all the wrong things with what they HAD as realized or potential successes.