Google keeps redefining everything

Earlier this morning, I was cleaning up someone’s blog post. Not because they wrote something bad, but because they committed the ultimate faux pas: They pasted directly from Microsoft Word into the blog engine. The bizarre HTML tags output from Word resulted in goofy output as well as a polluted RSS stream.

Many people have written about the strange HTML output from Microsoft Word. But that’s what happens when a company decides that it knows better than everyone else and insists on doing things its own way.

Google, like Microsoft, likes to do things its own way. As you can read on SDTimes.com, Google has recently bet heavily on HTML 5. In a keynote at the Google I/O conference, reports Alex Handy, HTML 5 will be at the forefront of the forthcoming Google Web Toolkit 2.0 and the new Google Web Elements.

That’s not all coming from the Googlers, who seem to be fighting every battle at once. The company continues to move forward with Android, its operating system for netbooks and smartphones, for example. This puts it into conflict with many, many companies, including Apple, Microsoft and RIM (makers of the BlackBerry).

The big new thing, however, is the new Wave platform and its set of APIs. What is Wave? It’s hard to describe. Google says:

Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

Good luck with that.

Google’s creativity is commendable. My big worry is that the company never seems to finish anything. Gmail is still considered to be in beta, for heaven’s sake! Let’s hope that Google doesn’t morph into Microsoft: having lots of interesting ideas, which are implemented in a way that drive people crazy.