John Maeda created quite a stir with his montage of the Yahoo and Google homepages from 1996 to 2006 in simple is about staying simple:

Although Philipp Lenssen has posted on this topic before (he calls it the portal plague), it's still striking. Altavista made the same mistake, and they didn't survive.

There's an interesting anecdote about Google's absolute focus on minimalism in Seth Godin's book Purple Cow:

It turns out that the folks at Google are obsessed with the email they get criticizing the service. They take it very seriously. One person writes in every once and a while and he never signs his name. According to Marissa Meyer at Google, "Every time he writes, the e-mail contains only a two-digit number. It took us a while to figure outWaterford police apologize for not helping baby locked in hot car

Marc Daalder | Detroit Free Press

Waterford Township's police department released an apology on Thursday morning after a 911 dispatcher refused to send help when a 2-month-old baby was accidentally trapped in a hot car, according to a CBS News report.

According to CBS News, Lacey Guyton was visiting her grandmother on Aug. 18 when the doors on her Dodge SUV locked – with the keys and her 2-month-old daughter, Raina, inside. While Guyton tried to smash the front windshield, her grandmother dialed police. Twice, the police dispatcher said the department doesn't send emergency vehicles to deal with keys locked in cars.

Finally, Guyton managed to break the back windshield with her grandfather's window breaker and climbed in to rescue her