How Larry Page Plans To Change Google Forever In 2012

For a long time, Google was boring.

It bought companies and buried them. It released new products, like Buzz and Wave, that nobody cared about.

Larry Page started to change that when he reclaimed control of the company last spring.

He cut a bunch of failures, put new leaders in charge, launched the company's first ever successful social product, Google+, and dropped more than $12 billion on a phone manufacturer, Motorola.

Some of these ideas might turn out to be stupid or not work out the way he expected. But at least they're not boring.

Page says Google is no longer a "search company." He says its model is: invent wild thing that will help humanity, get them adopted by users, profit, and then use the corporate structure to keep inventing new things.

So what does Larry have up his sleeve this year?

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt tipped this one last month, telling an Italian newspaper that Google will "market a tablet of the highest quality" in the next six months.

So far, most Android tablets have flopped (except for Amazon's Kindle Fire, which is only Android way deep down and has no connections to Google services), and the platform is infuriatingly buggy and unreliable.

That has to change. So Google will probably to take an approach like it has with the Nexus Android phones, working closely with one hardware partner to create the ideal Android tablet.

A pay TV service

This one has been rumored since last fall.

Google is moving all the pieces into place -- Motorola can provide the set top boxes, Google TV is the software, and the fiber optic network in Kansas City provides the pipe. It's even got a great original content channel in YouTube.

Now all it needs are some big content deals like the cable TV providers have.

Billions to spend on video content

Last year, Google was close to dropping $4 billion to buy Hulu, but couldn't quite reach terms -- Google wanted to be sure it could extend Hulu's content deals for longer than Hulu's owners were willing to offer them.

So why not license the content directly from media companies just like Comcast and every cable company does today? Sure, it would cost billions, but Google would be able to bolster a lot of its newer products, from Android tablets to Google TV, and would have a whole new advertising business to mine.