Google Launches Email

USATODAY.com - Google sets up e-mail make that, Gmail

Well it seems I'm writing about Google a lot, but the primary reason for this is the dramatic amount of recent changes that the company has made.

After keeping most of the products under the hood for such a long period of time, Google has in the past 3 months fully launched:
- Froogle (now prominently displayed on the front page)
- Google Local (direct competition to Yahoo local search)
- Google Personal
- And now GMail (Google's free email service)

The theory running around Silicon Valley was that Google was dead in the water, had grown too fast to innovate quickly enough, and was suffering severe internal strife. This blitz of public launches of new products is either aimed at proving detractors wrong to gear up for an IPO or aimed at making sure competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft have to spend serious dollars to acquire users.

The one worry I have is that Google will start to become too much of a portal property and will change the simple clean UI that has gotten them to where they are today.