Are Google's challenges turning into a burden?

Google has come under some strain these past weeks as it tries to diversifies into more and more areas. By doing so, the tech giant keeps bumping up against legal boundaries, turning them into a unfriendly giant monopolist.

Diane Mermigas at Seeking Alpha takes an interesting spin on the challenges Google are facing:

Like past monoliths of new growth industries, Google appears to be invincible. But Google is vulnerable just because it is thinly spread in a rapidly changing marketplace where rivals are eating away at the edges and fighting for turf. A major shift in technology or consumer behavior could alter the playing field, just as it once did for broadcast TV networks, music companies, telephone companies and typewriter manufacturers.

Google is locked in its fiercest battles over search, email, office applications, social networking, portals and brand advertising, Web browsers, mobile operating systems, ad servers and exchanges, and operating systems.

Mermigas goes on to list a number of other challenges including: real-time social search, Microsoft/Yahoo search and advertising, digital books, streaming video and video search, mobile search and mobile applications and advertising.