Sergey Brinn's Google Keeps Its Word: "Features, Not Products"

The quotation in the title is from an October 20th, 2006 conference call. It underlined the wide spread of Google at the time and the reorientation to other means of developing products, implementing the horizontal functionality: "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", Sergey Brinn said.

2007 was the year when this started taking place and it took a big place in Internet life as well. I've mentioned Google Experimental letting you join some search experiments and integrating them in Google's main interface. Just what the doctor ordered: integrating new ideas into existing products.

In the same manner Blogger in Draft adds features to be released in Blogger and gathers the feedback from early adopters, Google Enterprise Labs has new features for the Google Search Appliance and Google Mini. Some other experiments are going on at the moment, like the most controversial feature of sharing with your friends the articles you deem interesting in Google Reader ("This is still a very experimental feature, so we'd love to hear what you think of it.") and Google Apps admins have the option to add the features from Gmail 2.0 ("We're happy to announce today that we are offering domain administrators the option of obtaining new features in your Google Apps accounts at the same time as we launch to our consumer users. You'll find this option in your control panel, and only in Next Generation, U.S. English settings. We feel this option strikes a balance between those of you who would like to immediately release new features to their users, and those who prefer to wait for our team to ensure that the features are useful and stable for our consumer users before we roll them out to all Google Apps users.").

Ionut Alex. Chitu, from googlesystem.blogspot.com, asks himself rhetorically, after seeing all this, whether the feature will have a single Google Labs or mini-labs for each and every Google product. What do you think?