More Features, Less Products

Sergey Brin talked about a new initiative at Google, at yesterday's conference call, when Google announced another impressive quarter.

"What we are concerned about is that if we continue to develop so many new individual products that are all their assorted silos, you will have to essentially search for our products before you can even use them. And then you will have to search before you can do a search, in many cases.

Instead what we're doing now is we are trying to create the horizontal functionality across a range of products, across media types and so forth. For example, I mentioned already Google Apps for Your Domain, and that in a sense is a product, but really it just combines a whole bunch of other offerings together, seamlessly integrated together so they can work well for an organization.

Another example which we haven't gotten quite up and running yet, but when you want to share your documents or your pictures or your videos, it would be nice to have the exact same way to share all those things, to have all that functionality available across all of those media types in the identical way, rather than developing sort of one-offs for each of those products."

After launching a lot of separate products, Google wants to integrate them. The idea is that it's very difficult to manage a lot of products, and it's much easier to have a unified interface. The puzzle pieces start to connect.

You can read the entire transcript at SeekingAlpha.