Michael at TechCrunch is clearly in a bad mood, but he’s bang on the money:

After I wrote about the launch of Google Spreadsheets this morning, one commenter said “Its very nice and sleak. Will be very useful for keeping track of money etc”, as if this was the first spreadsheet he’d ever seen. Some of the other comments were also overly effusive…

What drives this kind of blind enthusiasm? When is the last time Google released a product that really changed our lives? For me, it was (and is) their core search engine. And I do appreciate the POP access to Gmail (this was the one thing that converted me from hotmail for personal email). Everything since has been, well, somewhat underwhelming.

I think he’s right: Google search is ace, Google Notebook is a useful utility, and I quite like GMail (but not so much that I’d use it for my main email account), but everything else it’s done recently has been okay rather than OMG. Picasa was nifty when it first came out, but the latest iteration of Flickr is miles better (and on the Mac, iPhoto’s still the program to beat). Pages is GeoCities for the 21st Century, Google Talk is just a chat system, Blogger feels as if it’s stuck in a timewarp, Google Desktop is Yet Another Desktop Search program with added widgets, and so on.

As Michael puts it:

Google-love is getting out of hand.