I don't believe in balance, not in the classic way.
Innovation is born from the interaction between constraint and vision.
I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere.
I really believe that the virtual world mirrors the physical world.
The Googly thing is to launch products early on Google Labs and then iterate, learning what the market wants - and making it great. The beauty of experimenting in this way is that you never get too far from what the market wants. The market pulls you back.
I've always liked simplicity.