Google has no secret plan via slashdot
I really like posts like this. They take a lot of rumor and speculation and distill it down to the common elements that actually make sense. I feel like he's JUST a bit on the conservative side, but basically his premise is this: Google is going to focus on search first and for the most part ignore things that do not directly help in the forwarding of that goal. I think that they will try other markets, but until they figure out a way to charge other than Web Ads, I think they will be pretty limited (I assume subscriptions will be the next step for this; whether or not that's good enough to beat a lot of folks who work on the stuff they're likely to compete with as their primary business (MS Office, MS Windows Sharing, SAP, Oracle, Quicken, etc etc etc) is TBD).