Keeping a competitive edge is the biggest motivating factor in the technology business. Among the companies that engage in this endless race, there are those who excel by investing themselves in creating incredible products and those who experience scattershot success through multiple projects.

Whether keeping that competitive edge can ever happen for any company depends on how much it can invest in any project at a given time.
Companies that invest themselves into a limited number of lucrative projects do well just so long as their final products are innovative. But what happens to companies with vast resources to pour into multiple projects, only a few of which ever make it out of the lab, let alone become successful?

Well, in the long run they can stumble and ultimately fail.

A prime example of this scenario can actually be seen in the history of what we now know as one of the most successful and innovative companies in the field of technology.

Following the breakthrough successes of the Apple II and Macintosh computers, Apple was much what we know it as today. It was the company that sat on the cutting edge of what was possible in technology, in great part because of its ability to innovate and deliver incredible projects that set the pace for everybody else to follow.

In the business world, this was very well received. At the time that its stock went public back in the late 1970s, Apple enjoyed one of the highest initial public offerings ever seen. But things changed.

First, the two founders and chief innovators of the company, Steve Jobs and Steve Wosniak, were forced out or left. Next, the new leadership decided to turn loose the incredible innovative powers in its labs to tackle any number of projects either they or the engineers wanted.

This took a series of massive investments on the part of the company, which ate up much of its cash on hand and ultimately drove it to the brink of bankruptcy. Very few of these projects ever became products, and the few that did were failures. In the meantime, the few solid products they had stagnated while attention and resources were devoted to products that would never see the light of day.

What this example reminds me of is Google. Like Apple, Google was founded by two men who came out of nowhere to change things almost overnight. The algorithm that powers the Google search engine was groundbreaking at its time and has become much of the force that currently drives our online world.

But Google was not content with merely providing a search engine. It quickly began offering a whole host of tools and services like Gmail, and eventually software and hardware like the Chrome Web browser and Nexus One smartphone.

What bothers me about this is the failure rate of Google’s labs. Services like Google Wave and now Google Buzz have fallen flat while new projects, like Google’s ISP, appear to be a costly endeavor to test, let alone deploy and maintain. And while all of these innovations are taking place, many of the products that made Google great in the first place are stagnating.

I fear that if Google continues on its current path, it will wind up being very much like Apple in the mid 90s: a burned out shell of what it once was, with the sharks circling around its carcass waiting to finish it off. I just hope that the best and brightest we have seen in a long time does not become the least and dullest.