There's a big difference between an "innovation" and an "iteration." Google is a tweaker. They tweak. Which is fine - Batelle Labs did the same. But nothing they're doing is revolutionary, it's all iterative. Which is why you can't list five things.
I listed 5. jquery, adwords, gmail, maps, search processor. If you want specifics here are 5 things they specifically did which were innovative. selectors and navigating the dom in jquery. adwords not affecting pagerank yet being visible/desirable. DOM bindings in chrome. the java handling javascript in gwt. dns-prefetch integration in chrome working in tandem with their search engine.
jquery - a scripting tool. I'm not a programmer and I had scripting tools in Fortran. adwords - an advertising tool. Altavista, Jeeves, metacrawler and others all had said same. gmail - seriously? maps - mapquest was first in the consumer sphere, delorme beat Gmaps by 4-5 years. "search processor?" The google algorithm was an innovative approach but since 2001, Google has been tweaking the algorithm, not reinventing search. I worked a meeting with a VP from Google once. He told a large multinational corporation (under NDA) that Google's modus operandi is to move into a mature area of technology and suck all the profit out of it. They're deliberately not looking for places they can innovate - they're looking for low-hanging fruit they can pluck via brute force. Google Maps, for example, beat out Mapquest because Google was willing to invest in driving.every.road. That's not innovation. That's brute force.
so because google is a computer company, and they make software and hardward solutions, they are not innovative, since software and hardware solutions have already been made? Give me a break. you are oversimplying things and overlooking actual innovation in google's products. The methods they use to solve these problems are different and innovative. Saying that you are not a programmer doesn't make them not innovative. I guess it means that you dont understand the innovation. If I dumb down everything, then of course I could say that it's not innovative. flying car? blah, just another form of transportation. same as walking. so flying cars cannot be innovative. your point is weak. it saddens me that someone would argue it.
I'm sitting here and trying, and I think that I agree with you. As far as I can find examples for, Google just does things better. That's how they win. They are clever about how they go about something, and sometimes their existing technologies plug in in such a way to give an advantage, but in many cases, they just throw tons of talent and money at a problem others have been working at. That isn't to say that they don't have vision. I believe they do. They pick good problems to solve better than others do. You could say that the scale of their experiments is revolutionary. Only Google can inject Buzz into everyone's emails, or throw out a solution without a problem like Google Wave with such gusto. But I think that Google+ will eventually kill all of that. Ok, maybe Google Wave was some sort of innovation. I only say that, because I can't say what it was trying to solve.