Comment by stingraycharles 11 hours ago
Xerox was also famously early with a lot of things but failed to create proper products out of it.
Google falls somewhere in the middle. They have great R&D but just can’t make products. It took OpenAI to show them how to do it, and the managed to catch up fast.
I don't think Google is bad at building products. They definitely are excellent at scaling products.
But I reckon part of the sentiment stems from many of the more famous Google products being acquisitions orignally (Android, YouTube, Maps, Docs, Sheets, DeepMind) or originally built by individual contributors internally (Gmail).
Then here were also several times where Google came out with multiple different products with similar names replacing each other. Like when they had I don't know how many variants of chat and meeting apps replacing each other in a short period of time. And now the same thing with all the different confusing Gemini offerings. Which leads to the impression that they don't know what they are doing product wise.
Starting with an acquisition is a cheap way of accelerating once your company reaches a certain size.
Look at Microsoft - Powerpoint was an acquisition. They bought most of the team that designed and built Windows NT from DEC. Frontpage was an acquisition, Azure came after AWS and was led by a series of people brought in in acquisitions (Ray Ozzie, Mark Russinovich, etc.). It's how things happen when you're that big.
I think it's a little unfair to give DEC credit for NT. Sure, they may have bought the team, but they did most (all?) of the work on NT at Microsoft.
That's not like Google buying Android when they already had a functioning (albeit not at all polished) smartphone OS.
Those are all free products, some of them are pretty good. But free is the best business strategy to get a product to the top of the market. Are others better, are you willing to spend money to find out? Clearly, most people are not interested. The fact that they can destroy the market for many different types of software by giving it away and still stay profitable is amazing. But that's all they are doing. If they started charging for everything there would be better competition and innovation. You could move a whole lot of okay-but-not-great cars, top every market segment you want, if you gave them away for free. Only enthusiasts would remain to pay for slightly more interesting and specific features. Literally no business model can survive when their primary product is competing with good-enough free products.
> Products: Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Maps, Youtube, Workspace (Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, Meet), Photos, Play Store, Chromebook, Pixel ... not to mention Cloud, Waymo, and Gemini ...
Many of those are acquisitions. In-house developed ones tend to be the most marginal on that list, and many of their most visibly high-effort in-house products have been dramatic failures (e.g. Google+, Glass, Fiber).
I was extremely surprised that Google+ didn't catch on. The week before Google+ launched, me and all my friends agreed that Facebook is toast, Google will do the same thing but better, and everyone has a Gmail account so there will be basically zero barrier to entry. Obviously, we were wrong; Google+ managed to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory, Google+ never got significant traction, and Facebook managed to keep growing and now they're yet another Big Evil Tech Corporation.
Honestly, I still don't really know how Google managed to mess that up.
I got early access to Google+ because of where I worked at the time. The invite-only thing had worked great for GMail but unfortunately a social network is useless if no-one else is on it. Then the real names thing and the resulting drumbeat of horror stories like "Google doxxed me to my violent ex-husband" killed what little momentum they had stone dead. I still don't know why they went so hard on that, honestly.
They come up with tons and tons of products like Google Glass and Google+ and so on and immediately abandon them. It is easy to see that there is no real vision. They make money off AdSense and their cloud services. That's about it.
Google does abandon a lot of stuff, but their core technologies usually make their way into other, more profitable things (collaborative editing from Wave into Docs; loads of stuff from Google+; tagging and categorizing in Photos from Picasa (I'm guessing); etc)
I think the sentiment is usually paired with discussion about those products as long-lasting, revenue-generating things. Many of those ended up feeding back into Search and Ads. As an exercise, out of the list you described, how many of those are meaningfully-revenue-generating, without ads?
A phrasing I've heard is "Google regularly kills billion-dollar businesses because that doesn't move the needle compared to an extra 1% of revenue on ads."
And, to be super pedantic about it, Android and YouTube were not products that Google built but acquired.
They bought YouTube but you have to give Google a hell of a lot of credit for turning it into what it is today. Taking ownership of YouTube at the time was seen by many as taking ownership of an endless string of copyright lawsuits, suing them into oblivion.
And to my point, it took Apple to make the iPhone for Google to make Android.
It took OpenAI for Google to finally understand make a product out of their years if not decades of AI research.
YouTube and Maps are both acquisitions indeed.
Google had less incentive. Their incentive was to keep API bottled up and in brewing as long as possible so their existing moats in search, YouTube can extend in other areas. With openai they are forced to compete or perish.
Even with gemini in lead, its only till they extinguish or make chatgpt unviable for openai as business. OpenAI may loose the talent war and cease to be leader in this domain against google (or Facebook) , but in longer term their incentive to break fresh aligns with average user requirements . With Chinese AI just behind, may be google/microsoft have no choice either
Google was especially well positioned to catch up because they have a lot of the hardware and expertise and they have a captive audience in gsuite and at google.com.
"They have great R&D but just can’t make products"
Is this just something you repeat without thinking? It seems to be a popular sentiment here on Hacker News, but really makes no sense if you think about it.
Products: Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Maps, Youtube, Workspace (Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, Meet), Photos, Play Store, Chromebook, Pixel ... not to mention Cloud, Waymo, and Gemini ...
So many widely adopted products. How many other companies can say the same?
What am I missing?