This is my final post on Google Watch. Today, I've moved on to the next leg of my career at the Wall Street Journal, where I'll be writing content for CIO Journal . So Google will move from the center of my coverage galaxy to somewhere on the periphery. The company continues to ply its trade versus Amazon in platform-as-a-service )PAAS( and Microsoft with Google Apps. These are solutions CIOs must consider as they seek to cut costs and offload resource management.

The Google-watching world has been abuzz since yesterday about Google Play. No, it's not a new streaming music service from the search engine giant, though you'd be forgiven for thinking so. Actually, the irony is that the moniker is indicative of how Google is trying to rationalize some of the confused branding and marketing its content services have suffered from in the last two years. Google Play is, simply, the Android Market application store,

Far be it from me to throw cold water on the prospect of exciting new software from Google, but the Google-is-building-a-Siri-rival meme is wearing thin on me. I noted last year how the smart speech recognition service would be called Majel . Now TechCrunch says that name has changed to, simply, Google Assistant. Check out these other bullet points from the report, which said Assistant's goal is to: Get the world's knowledge into a format a computer can understand.

Chris Bronk, Senior Advisor, IRM's Office of eDiplomacy, U.S. Department of State Google's Chrome browser adoption can be counted in the 200-plus million download range, but it helps to have big organizations embrace the browser. This is super challenging at a time Microsoft Internet Explorer remains the de facto browser for the Windows PCs orgs and businesses buy. To wit, Google scored a coup with Chrome when the U.S. State Department ,

Do Not Track presents some interesting obstacles for Internet giants that rely on Web advertising, with Google poised to be significantly impacted in the display ad market. A quick refresher: Do Not Track will allow Internet users to add a Do Not Track header from browsers such as Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. This will tell Websites not to track them across the Web. Google agreed to support the header in Chrome by the end of the year,

Much of Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt's keynote discussion at Mobile World Congress Feb. 28 concerned very forward-looking, sci-fi-type stuff. Sample: people will deploy robots on their behalf to conferences and concerts when they can't be both places at once. People will experience both activities through the robot via a screen they control at home. But Schmidt also had exciting news he believes is going to become true in the near future. Thanks to Moore's Law,

Google CEO Larry Page said during his last earnings conference call that Google+ has over 90 million users . He declined to reveal the user engagement of those users . Now comScore reveals that Google+ users only spend an average of 3 minutes there a month, compared to 405 minutes per user on Facebook. People are spending close to 7 hours a month on the leading social networking Website. Here's comScore's raw data,

The whole Is Google Evil Meme? has grown to be a ridiculous, farcical debate, prone to solemn punditry by some of the most authoritative voices in high-tech. I've defended Google countless times here, but I've never subscribed to the notion that Google is good, much less evil. No business deserves the evil mantle. Well, except maybe Enron. You could argue a converse case for hours. The discussion about whether Google is good or evil isn't a binary debate.

No one is raving about the job Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha has done in the last couple years . The last couple of quarters have been iffy as Motorola missed expectations both times. But Jha did preside over some of my favorite phones, such as the Motorola Droid X, Droid Razr and my new favorite, the 3300 mAh super-charged, long-lasting Droid Razr Maxx. Amazing battery life. Yet Bloomberg reported Google is poised to hire Dennis Woodside,

Google's Fiber ambitions for high-speed Internet access are slowly but surely coming together in the form of paid TV programming, and it's something we should have seen coming. Remember when we first learned of Fiber two years ago this month, when wacky political wonks jumped in shark tanks and ice-cold water to win Google's hand for the Fiber? It was going to be some experimental test. As I noted last year,

For a company without major cloud computing collaboration clout, Microsoft has a good sense of humor regarding its competition with Google. Coming from the underdog - if only because Google has over 4 million business customers thanks to a four-year head start in Web-based collaboration software for businesses - "Googlelighting" is cute. It's a video that strongly suggests Google is a search business that just does cloud collaboration software on the side,

Anyone else think this is just wrong? There will no doubt be some search traditionalists and Google lovers who will see this as sacrilege. I see it as another shining example of how Google+ is coming to be synonymous with Google. Or is Google becoming synonymous with Google+. Increasingly, the lines are blurring. Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan doesn't like it : Personally, if find it intrusive.

Every reporter under the sun painted Google's use of cookies to insert its Google+ functionality on Apple's Safari browser as an invasion of users' privacy. The rub is this: Google and a few other advertising companies have secretly tracked the Web browsing habits of millions of people using Apple's Mac computers, iPhones and iPad tablets. Apple's Safari browser is designed to prevent such monitoring to preserve user privacy,

Sometimes you read reports and just shake your head. That was the case for this DigiTimes report that said Google is rushing Android 5.0 "Jelly Bean to market in the second quarter . The reason? "Adoption of Android 4.0 has fallen short of original expectations and Microsoft will launch Windows 8 in the third quarter of 2012." Huh? True, Ice Cream Sandwich is only on roughly 1 percent of smartphones and tablets,

Path's privacy snafu of collecting address book data and storing it on remote servers without permission opened the floodgates of media hellhounds on that startup, along with Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp and others. This comes a week after Google spent a couple weeks being demonized for its planned privacy policy changes, which go into effect next month. So it was interesting to see the blowback from Path spray Apple like a double-barrel shotgun.

Google is well known for its collegiate roots, hatched as it was by co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University back in the late 1990s. So it's only fitting that PageRank, the defining algorithm that set Google apart from Overture, Yahoo, Microsoft and many others to date, is being applied at another university. However, rather than using the technology to create a labyrinthine network of links to Websites,

Anyone who reads this blog knows I'm a pretty faithful follower of John Battelle's own Search Blog. Battelle sparked an interesting conversation about the mobile ad opportunities voice search technologies such as Google Voice Actions and Apple's Siri virtual assistant. Battelle wrote: Driving into work yesterday I realized how useful voice search is going to be to me, once I've got it installed. Stuck in traffic, I tried searching for alternate routes,

This fine piece in Wired about a "perpetual window into Gmail" caught my attention this weekend for two reasons. First, I live in Gmail. It's my primary, personal e-mail haven. Second, considering the data-sucking sounds Path made this month, the idea that Gmail is playing fast and loose with my 411 is alarming to say the least. Here's the rub: Oauth,

Unlike my blogger peers, I'm not usually want to skewer a so-called scoop. And I won't start, but I will point out that two intriguing pieces in the The Wall Street Journal came off as old news, warmed over instead of hot stuff. First is this piece about the Google cloud storage drive - something first unveiled over 5 years ago: Drive allows people to store photos,

n as good-ole NFC, was one of a handful of rages in 2011. You couldn't read a story about mobile payment systems without seeing NFC as one of the keywords, which is ironic because NFC-based mobile payment systems haven't exactly taken off. I'm looking at you Google Wallet. What we do have are more practical, low-risk information use cases. These, too, are based on Google's Android platform. Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" includes NFC capabilities .