Feed that pony

Google: It’s tempting to see Google’s announcement-a-day behavior as a sign of Microsoft-like mission creep. Just this week the search firm said it would begin building a broadband network, blew millions on a Super Bowl advertisement and launched a new social networking feature. While this might sound like corporate attention deficit order, Google’s initiatives are nothing like the software group's sad path to obese mediocrity.

When Microsoft was on top of the world in the late 1990s, the company had an overarching idea — its Windows operating system should be used everywhere. That sounds a bit like Google’s desire to organize the world's information.

The trouble with Microsoft’s mission was that the company had to take PC software out of its natural habitat. That meant creeping into businesses ranging from manufacturing MP3 players and game consoles, investing in cable networks, to re-engineering Windows to run in mobile phones. None of these ventures covered their cost of capital.

Some of Google’s recent initiatives would appear to uncomfortably mirror Microsoft's misguided moves. Rolling out a new mobile phone and building a broadband network aren't the only eerie parallels. Google even named its social networking tool for email “Buzz”. That sounds like a sibling of Microsoft's Zune.

Yet Google’s recent efforts are designed around one objective — increasing search. And that may be an easier goal to achieve than putting Windows software everywhere. Advertising is a natural step to take. Google wants more customers, and it reached more than 100 million viewers with its popular Super Bowl ad. As for Buzz, well, it generated some for the company at a relatively low cost of development.

True, Google's got other, bigger initiatives in the works, like a plan announced Wednesday to create an ultra-fast broadband network for up to half a million Americans. That ambitious plan sounds like Google jumping into the cable business — another echo of Microsoft's value-destructive strategic drift.

But it's probably best to read Google's latest move as a provocation to the phone and cable providers to speed up Internet connections overall or risk having to compete directly with Google. That alone should spur them into action, making it easier for customers to surf the Web, where the number one application is search.

Google's efforts may seem scattershot. But make no mistake, Google doesn't want to be a phone company, it's still about search.