According to the new Steve Jobs biography, Jobs told Larry Page to decide what Google wants to be when it grows up. I hope Larry took this to heart.  I’m no great Apple fan – I simply don’t enjoy the constrained user experience of their mobile devices – and I do buy Android phones, but I’m no great Google fan, either.

Here’s the problem: Google is all over the place and seems to be perfectly comfortable in the role of saying “Hey! Me too!” That may have worked for it in the beginning: Alta Vista (anyone else remember Alta Vista?) had a great search engine, then Google came in and said “Hey, we can do that better!” And they did. And that was great. It was a totally different experience.

When Gmail was launched, it was a tiny bit better than Yahoo Mail, too. Since then, thought, they have not had enough focus on one project to make it worth listening to them when they say “Hey! Me, too!”

Google TV was launched to chase Apple TV with no apparent benefit. I love my Android phones, but only after I get someone else’s software on them. The fact that I need to root and install a ROM means the “Hey! Me too!” to the iPhone wasn’t all that effective. I also own a Xoom. Don’t even get me started on how incomplete the Xoom is. The best thing it has going for it is the fact that it has stereo speakers (the iPad doesn’t), but that little bit of “Hey me too!” was not progress. And this is supposed to be the flagship Android tablet.

Most publicly, Google is truly terrible at social networking. Buzz is dead, Google+ will end up in the graveyard of forgotten platforms, too, make no mistake. I understand the business thinking behind it, but it’s not working. Google needs to either spin off a team of people to create something and see if it grows organically or buy something unique that has. Just look at how popular Orkut is in India and Brazil. For the US market, copying Facebook won’t work. We don’t want another Facebook. We’re already there.

There’s a difference between being a great innovator, drastically improving someone else’s ideas like Edison did with the light bulb or Apple did with the iPod, and just being a Johnny-come-lately. Nowadays, when we hear Google shout “Hey! Me too!”, guess which one we think of?