The anemic progress of Google Finance has been gaining some attention lately, with a News Factor Network article highlighting the portal's lack of "stickiness". Many users who have been using Yahoo! Finance or other online financial portals get locked in to these services via personalization features and stock lists that make them daily "must see" visits for individual investors. Google finance has a portfolio tracker feature but there's not easy way to transfer one's holdings to the service and no alerts triggering features. This list could go on and on, but the point is clear: Google is very late to this game and is not likely to catch up any time soon, in spite of an array of very valuable features and sources on the service. As a whole, though, the more important deficiency is the service's lack of focus on users' real needs the service fails to answer the question: what does an individual need to do in order to be successful with their finances?

While the answer to this question may not come from Google any time soon, its existing capabilities could be fed into other applications and portals that can come up with those answers via mashups and other Web services-oriented integrations. Google seems still at this time to be an "anti-portal" of sorts, moving slowly and deliberately to develop breakthrough features that could power solutions in any number of contexts. The unique features and first-rate sources used in Google Finance could be used to power any number of portal solutions in both media and enterprise environments. This may not bring them to parity with Yahoo any time soon in terms of absolute audience for their portal solutions, but it's a more likely strategy in the short and medium term to allow Google's solution to work its way into workflows that are useful to their audiences. In the meantime it would be nice if the considerable talent at Google would focus itself as much on the "what I need to do" aspects of usability in its online offerings as much as it does on developing powerful features that may leave a significant portion of their needs unaddressed.