Google's quality problem

Google's service used to be of the highest quality. As the company has grown, it maintained that quality – despite their famous eternal "betas", their work was actually very reliable.

I'm starting to see quite a lot of exceptions to that. I saw my first Google server error a couple of months ago (after eight years of using it), and since then I've seen a lot more.

Recently I decided to try Google Knol. Whoops... can't verify my identity:

Then Blogger went psycho, out of the blue while scrolling down my blog page:

And today I saw an article about Google Translation Center. I thought "hey, I hope this works..." and sure enough, it doesn't let me sign up:

What's going on? Google is trying hard to grow its business beyond search-based advertising revenues, and at the same time it is trying hard to drive traffic which results in advertising revenues. As they do this they risk diluting their famous brand with low-quality attempts to solve new problems.