Serious now, why do all the people out there cry (some more comments and thoughts) because Google advertises its own products on its own website. Everybody does that. Or have you ever seen a link to OpenOffice on Microsoft’s website? Or a big ISP telling to go to another ISP because they are cheaper?
If you run your own company, would you advertise for your competitor? Even not if their product is better than yours? Ask yourself why you would not do it.
And now imagine you are not a geek, blogger, hacker, hero, coder or Google-Fanboy. Do you really care what product you use? Do you care if your images are now on Flickr or on PicasaWeb? Do you care if your blog is run by blogger.com or by wordpress.com? All you want is a place to share your photos and link to them from your blog.
Of course for me as a competitor to Google it is a bad thing. Or is it my fault that I only get my visitors from Google Search? Why did I focus so hard on that? There are other ways to get users, even other search engines.
The real problem with the “real people”(TM) (not geek, coders) out there is that they think google IS the Internet. So when google says use Blogger for blogging, they belive that without any question.
But whats bad about this, you ask! Bad about this is that other competitor don’t have this posibility. Sure they can add some AdSense at google, but they are never that effective.
google have an absolute monopoly (more or less) on the search engine market (like m$ on os) it’s a realy bad thing (from the economics view point) to use this to push other products from the same company. On this way other companys have a real problem to go into the market. And a market without much competition is a bad thing (also for the monopoly company), because without competition there’s much less inovation.