Comment by wslh
Google is older and many of the products you describe were acquisitions (inorganic growth).
Google is older and many of the products you describe were acquisitions (inorganic growth).
Chrome's engine was WebKit originally, which they then forked. Not an acquisition, but benefitted greatly from prior work.
By this point I imagine it's a novelty to find any code from the original acquisition in those products.
Code is secondary. Pmf is primary.
Code is a commodity. Very easy to make. Now even llms are commodities. There are other intangible assets more valuable. Like the chatgpt brand here.
> google.com, youtube, chrome, android, gmail, google map etc
Of those, it's 50/50. The acquisitions were YT, Android, Maps. Search was obviously Google's original product, Chrome was an in-house effort to rejuvenate the web after IE had caused years of stagnation, and Gmail famously started as a 20% project.
There are of course criticisms that Google has not really created any major (say, billion-user) in-house products in the past 15 years.