When Google recently launched MyMaps David Galbraith called it the "The day Web 2.0 died" and Om Malik called it the "End of innocence".

This move is likely to wipe out a number of companies that built their added-value services on Google's API with Google's encouragement, cooperation and blessing.

Om Malik remarked:

"it won’t be the last time you will see [Google] adopt tactics that in the past were associated with Microsoft. Keeping that $145 billion market capitalization intact is a bitch!"

The whole "loss of innocence thing" prompted me to indulge in a slight reworking of Gordon Gekko's speech from "Wall Street" for my own lighthearted amusement as: "Gordon Gekko reminds us why Google is Good":

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we’re not here to indulge in fantasy, but in political and economic reality. The point is, ladies and gentleman, that Google — for lack of a better word — is good.

Google is right. Google works. Google clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Google, in all of its forms -- google for life, for money, for love, for knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind. And Google -- you mark my words -- will not only save Web 2.0, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the Internet. Thank you very much.

So has Google destroyed these companies? Or simply liberated them from an innocence that was going to cost them in the long run?

Are we watching the slow corruption is Google's own wide-eyed idealism? Or are we simply witnessing their coming of age.

Some of these companies now feel that they cannot hope to compete with Google as the competition. They may feel somewhat wronged and cheated.

Others might cite a reworking of a cautionary phrase used often used for those thinking of entering a field in which Microsoft could be part of their competition: "Google is not the competition, Google is the environment."