• San Jose Mercury News, Monday, December 5, 2011 9:20 AM

Facing a competitive landscape for its expanding menu of products, as well as antitrust investigations, privacy blowups and other PR problems, Google is spending more money on sales and marketing than ever before to recast its image with consumers.

Google now sells and rents music and movies online like Amazon and Netflix, competes with Facebook and plans on selling smartphones and tablet computers. "They want to get away from just being a hardscrabble engineering company to being a consumer brand," said Karsten Weide, an analyst with research firm IDC. "They realize they cannot win the war against Apple if they don't do that."

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