In any society if the people truthfully dislike their leader then that leader will be replaced. Long ago Microsoft applied this by developing great development tools. They managed to get people to use their libraries and their platform. From there the developers created better applications which in turned won over more users to their platform, other wise known as Windows.
Now, the same thing is happening with google, they are releasing lots of tools that developers can use like Calendars, Maps and many other apis. Their platform is the web and their massive server rooms. The latest volley in this is the
Code Search .
Now to the average person this is completely useful, though for the developer it can be very useful. Soon the developers will integrate this into the tools they use every day. This will be done so they can easily find code samples to make their job easier and build applications faster.
The way google will get ahead is quite simple, make code that is good to use on their platform rank higher then something that would work on say some other empire. This way over time plenty of applications will be using parts of googles api's, web site, databases and so on.
If you are questioning why is google building such simple gadgets that will not make as much money as their adwords, adsense product. Then most like you have not taken account into what happens when you went over the people.
Brick by brick google is taking over the web and using the power of the search to do this.
