Google: deconstructing itself

One more time I have to give Google credit for doing the right thing - clearly they keep working on "do no evil":
- After building Gmail, they introduced Google Apps, as a way for anyone to have their own Google Apps for their own domain name.
- Then they have opened Google Apps to others and provided a Google Marketplace where you can get all kinds of Google Apps plugins to enhance your own experience. And you have the choice of maintaining several Google accounts separately (per domain name).
This is a great example of building services to the point where they gain critical mass (Gmail), to then deconstruct these services into independent sets (Google Apps) so that you can give more control back to the user and allow the creation of a healthy ecosystem around the IP created (Google Marketplace). The next step for Google is to open the hosting itself to other service providers so that you can have "Google inside" in a completely independent system, creating an architecture with no single point of failure.
In the meantime Facebook, LinkedIn and other silos should learn from this approach and open up their services. A Facebook for my own domain? Google Buzz may get there earlier than the others. Google Wave is now a plugin for Google Apps, so it may not be that long before Google Buzz becomes one too, and if they do it will be interesting to see what happens.