Here's to Google continuing to innovate and challenge the status quo rather than being the status quo themselves. (I know not everyone is probably going to be a fan of this.
They challenge the status quo ? i thought they want the traffic routed through their servers and that is why they come up with almost every web service possible. They just create competitive service to kill the business who bring the concept in the market.
Google dynamic view was created to beat tumblr as tumblr's popularity is growing charts these days. By the way what facebook has to do with blogging ? 
-mahesh2k
Timeslides/Timeline.
You don't have to be the underdog to challenge the status quo.
The key to promoting innovation is, as you said, when Google "creates" "competitive" services.
This never kills competition because, then, newer start-ups have a better idea of what has been offered and could then build upon that. This in turn builds up better services.
Not only that, this won't beat Tumblr. app has pretty much highlighted many of the problems which is why it's admirable that Google would try something like this in light of many of the obvious problems.
It's often not what the big guys are building that creates the status quo, it's when the big guys are destroying innovation whether it is from buying out services and then phasing them out, or from training consumers to settle for the same product via filling the web with clones of popular services in a blind attempt to cash in on popular competitors (The latter being what you are referring to as opposed to your initial sentence of when big businesses create "competitive" services) that Google kills innovators and innovation.
In this case, Google has the potential of opening up a key important perspective which is multiple views. Did they create this with the intention to compete with Tumblr? Irrelevant. This time unlike Google's attempt with FB clone, Google is not serving up the same dish as Tumblr. They are opening up a new thing. This time, they are
competing not just
cloning or
stealing. This time, regardless of whether this concept may have existed before or not, Google is attempting
to build a "better" Blogger (their current service with their users) rather than attempting to create something new in order to "steal" Tumblr's thunder. This time they are just as much competing via
taking care of their own people (their Blogger userbase) and not simply competing via starting an argument with the next door neighbor through creating a local copycat.
Whether this new thing pans out or not is still up in the air (currently I don't see it panning out) ...but
at least it's starting to compete via providing something different again by inching in on a potential new recipe rather than just trying to build a Google branded pie.
It's these attempts that have always gotten Google to where they are as opposed to the Google you describe as hating, and I think it deserves praising even more so than any other hyped up project anyone has come up with recently because the value here is not the product - it's the hopeful message that a major service like Google with all it's abilities and recent personality preference to clone and compete with other clones, still attempted this risky thing that is less of a clone and more of a concept that redefines the usage of how people consume the web with almost little benefit to them other than simply releasing that concept "in order to compete".
