14 ms·

Google needs to own its failures. It can't ship anything new or innovative. The only things that they've been good at is acquiring things that other people ha

Google needs to own its failures. It can't ship anything new or innovative. The only things that they've been good at is acquiring things that other people have invented (Youtube, Android, etc). Buzz? dead. Wave? dead. Plus? dead. Allo? dead. It's so bad now that even features and innovation on their existing platforms are dying. Youtube? Everything they do with Youtube is a screwup. Android? Good luck getting an app in the app store without Google accidentally killing your company. Google Cloud? Sorry... everyone's on AWS or Azure. Search? Nope... Elasticsearch now dominates that space. Think about it. Elasticsearch now beats Google at what Google should have dominated - search.

EduardoBautista 7y ago
Elasticsearch does not at all compete with Google Search.
- mbreese 7y ago
  How much does it compete with the (defunct) on-site Google search appliance? Or rather -- how much could it have competed if it hadn't been killed? Imagine if there still was a private Google search tool for businesses where you could have patched into those APIs for integrating new tools. Everything could have been searchable -- Slack, Email, Docs... everything. Instead, they are all siloed.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Not too much. The GSA died because of some stupid internal Google political battle.
  - hammock 7y ago
    We are moving back towards that. Google Assistant is trying to let you search inside of apps, if I recall correctly
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    > Imagine if there still was a private Google search tool for businesses where you could have patched into those APIs for integrating new tools. Everything could have been searchable -- Slack, Email, Docs... everything. Isn't that what https://cloud.google.com/products/search/ https://cloud.google.com/products/search/ claims to do?
echelon 7y ago
> Google Cloud? Sorry... everyone's on AWS or Azure. Google Cloud was late to the party, but they were very smart to invest in GPUs near edge nodes. I think Stadia is primed to eat the gaming world's lunch. They can reuse this capacity for ML during off-peak hours. I'm actually kind of scared of Stadia. I like having physical copies of console games, and if Google makes major inroads they could become the dominant player in the gaming industry. They definitely won't be friendly to physical form factors.
- mark_l_watson 7y ago
  I have bought a lot of virtual content on Google Play Movies and Books. I am not nervous at all about that content going away. I imagine it is not quite the same for games which might require maintenance like security updates. Still, old versions of their games should be available.
- reificator 7y ago
  I'm a huge fan of digitally purchased games. By purchased I mean games with no DRM that don't require a multiplayer server or anything. Humble Bundle and GoG are good sources for these, but you can find them on Steam and such as well. On the flip side, physical games are no longer truly self contained. Day one patches and license keys and DRM and server shutdowns all prevent you from owning the content on the disk any more than a digital purchase. Now if only I still had time to play games...
  - sombremesa 7y ago
    The person you're replying to specifically mentioned console games. Consoles have a (very) capacity (given the size of the average game), there are benefits to having physical copies of the games rather than digital.
    - reificator 7y ago
      Most consoles that allow for downloading games have an option for external storage. My switch has a 256 or 512 gig SD card. Xbox and Playstation allow for USB hard drives.
dcolkitt 7y ago
Chrome, Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Golang, AngularJS, Prometheus, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, Vitess, Spanner, Flutter, Bazel, GoogleTest, Istio, V8, AlphaZero Seems like Google innovates and builds a ton. It's the whole dealing with customers part that they don't like.
- aesthethiccs 7y ago
  Angularjs + Angular doesn't belong in that list. how they handled that transition gave react a huge footing, splintered the framework community, also have made it very hard to search for their own framework.
  - andrewstuart 7y ago
    Wasn't the bigger problem that it was hard and heavyweight and felt like you needed to be a Java developing software engineer to make anything substantial with AngularJS?
  - ErikAugust 7y ago
    Well, AngularJS shouldn't belong on that list because it was brought in from an acquisition, I believe.
- jjtheblunt 7y ago
  Isn't Golang really Bell Labs guys, now Google. MapReduce far far predates Google, in shared-memory multiprocessors of the late 80s and thereafter, for instance, though didn't Google popularize it.
  - dagw 7y ago
    Isn't Golang really Bell Labs guys, now Google. Golang was developed at Google, with Googles blessing, by Google employees. I don't know how much more you can ask for. What difference does it make that some of the people had jobs before Google. MapReduce far far predates Google The general concept was known, the implementation and algorithms Google used to run MapReduce efficiently on large cluster of heterogeneous machines was original to Google.
finolex1 7y ago
I don't think it's half as bad as that. Google Flights, Translate, the G-Suite, Firebase and TensorFlow have all been good products/software, though perhaps not world-changing.
- ianai 7y ago
  Translate has been around as long as I can remember. It works exactly how I remember translate.altavista.com working-except I can’t remember whether alta vista could detect language.
  - topmonk 7y ago
    The Google Translate android app has a magic camera that recognizes translates and replaces the text in real time in the video feed. That's pretty cool.
    - Crosseye_Jack 7y ago
      So does Google Translate on iPhone. But that was originally Word Lens, then google brought them and for a time the lens app became free then they added the functionality to the Google Translate app.
  - rerx 7y ago
    There has been a staggering amount of innovation in machine translation. Google has some of the leading groups in research for neural machine translation and they put a lot of it into production. Saying that it works just like Altavista's Bablefish of yore is ridiculous, at least for the European languages I am familiar with. Translation quality as offered by all major services is leagues ahead compared to the state of, say, three years ago. (Disclaimer: I work on a competitor to Google Translate)
    - ianai 7y ago
      I meant UI...copy paste text on left side and output on right side. Of course there’s been innovation underneath. My comment wouldn't be two sentences if I had any knowledge about how alta vista or google translate work(ed) underneath.
shafyy 7y ago
What about Gmail and Maps? Anyhow, acquiring the right companies, integrating them successfully and keeping them successful is an equally important skill for a big corp. Look at FB, where would they be without being excellent at acquiring companies (IG, WhatsApp, Oculus). Edit: Can't spell
- andromeduck 7y ago
  Well inbox was a brewth of fresh air but apparently if you can't get a billion users of a billion bucks in a year or two it's just not worth doing.
- bigiain 7y ago
  Interestingly, the Google Wave team was lead by the founders of Where2 - the company they acquired and turned into Google Maps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_developer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_devel...
- Causality1 7y ago
  The only way Google actually commits to a product is if it becomes so popular so fast that killing it would rock society as we know it. Gmail, YouTube, Maps, etc.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
Thanks for mentioning Google Buzz. I had forgotten about that. Google published a sample AppEngine project that was very hackable and used the Buzz data stream. Nice, but now it is gone.
- cryptoz 7y ago
  Buzz's effect is still very much alive in production Google code. Gmail specifically bans you from using a label called 'buzz' due to this product bungle. Like 1B+ people plus are loading code today that references Buzz still, it's crazy. Edit: Screenshot https://imgur.com/a/ERuEwuo https://imgur.com/a/ERuEwuo
misiti3780 7y ago
all the greats of history create a lot of duds. Michelangelo threw away (and didn't finish) 75% of his works. many more examples in history.
ewoodrich 7y ago
> Android? Good luck getting an app in the app store without Google accidentally killing your company. Kinda painting with a broad brush about the world's most popular operating system with an 85% mobile marketshare. >Search? Nope... Elasticsearch now dominates that space. Again, being really selective here ignoring the virtual monopoly on consumer search.
- Yeroc 7y ago
  Android was actually a Google acquisition as well...
  - icebraining 7y ago
    More of an acquihire. Even the version they showed in 2007 (two years after the acquisition) bared little resemblance with what it became.
    - keedon 7y ago
      Isn't the change mainly due to the iPhone being released? Before that it was a copy of the blackberry look & feel
DangitBobby 7y ago
I've only dabbled a bit in Azure and AWS, so I can't do much of a direct comparison, but GCP really seems to have its shit together in a major way. It has a high degree of polish and usability.
bigiain 7y ago
This isn't "google owning" their failures, but this: https://gcemetery.co https://gcemetery.co at least memorialises them...
- ukyrgf 7y ago
  It's funny that there are multiple takes on this: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Google needs to own its failures. It can't ship anything new or innovative. K8s? BigQuery? Chrome (in particular v8)? > Wave? dead. Wasn't Wave effectively a tech preview for collaboration technology central to Docs and Sheets? Whether or not that's the case, aren't Docs and Sheets counterexamples to your argument? > Google Cloud? Sorry... everyone's on AWS or Azure. AWS and Azure have together (as of Q4 2018) a bit less than 50% of the public cloud market, hardly “everyone”. Proportionately, Google is closer to Azure than Azure is to AWS, and has a higher growth rate than any of the other major public clouds, bigger or smaller. [0] AWS has first mover advantage, Azure has leveraging Microsoft’s preexisting deep penetration into enterprise. But Google's gaining on them, anyway. [0] https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cloud-market-share-q4-2018-and-full-year-2018 https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cloud-market-share-q4-2018-...
- michaelt 7y ago
  Wasn't Wave effectively a tech preview for collaboration technology central to Docs and Sheets? According to Wikipedia, Docs launched in March 2006 and Wave in May 2009. And Docs had collaborative editing from the start (Google brought it from a startup with that feature already working)
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    Right, but Wave was the foundation for the real-time conversations and other collaboration improvements added to Google Docs (etc.) during the period at the end of Wave’s life as an independent project at Google. https://lifehacker.com/google-docs-updates-with-a-drawing-editor-real-time-co-5513760 https://lifehacker.com/google-docs-updates-with-a-drawing-ed...
    - michaelt 7y ago
      But Docs had the ability for multiple people to concurrently edit a document and see one another's changes [1] before Wave was even launched - right? Hasn't live multi-user editing been there all along? [1] https://youtu.be/dSGkzDgW1fA?t=78 https://youtu.be/dSGkzDgW1fA?t=78
cnaut 7y ago
Google Photos and Google Maps are underrated in terms of future potential for Google's business
- anchpop 7y ago
  Google Photos by far is my favorite Google app. Whatever team works on that should be in charge of everything at Google.
mola 7y ago
Yeah, it's a shame. They were a really exciting company when they were about creating good products and not just about making us the product. Search was a game changer. Gmail was an amazing product compare to the incumbents at the time. It really felt as if product was king, with tech following closely. Now it feels like it's more about MBA type managers that care much more about the bottom line than about the product and customer. I think that Milton Friedman spiel about giving Shareholder value as the main objective of a manager, as opposed to giving value to customers, has done major damage to humanity, and the capitalist system.
krasicki 7y ago
The developer community needs to acknowledge Google's successes and contributions. I seem to remember that (maybe Facebook) had its WAVE development team recruited away. The Chrome browser and Chromebooks are non-trivial examples of Google's successes. WAVE was genius and needed time and feedback loops to mature. I morn early Polymer more than WAVE. Spot on brilliant. But yes, Google is this generation's Digital Equipment Corp. - engineering brilliance/marketing ineptitude.

EduardoBautista 7y ago

Elasticsearch does not at all compete with Google Search.

mbreese 7y ago
How much does it compete with the (defunct) on-site Google search appliance? Or rather -- how much could it have competed if it hadn't been killed? Imagine if there still was a private Google search tool for businesses where you could have patched into those APIs for integrating new tools. Everything could have been searchable -- Slack, Email, Docs... everything. Instead, they are all siloed.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Not too much. The GSA died because of some stupid internal Google political battle.
- hammock 7y ago
  We are moving back towards that. Google Assistant is trying to let you search inside of apps, if I recall correctly
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  > Imagine if there still was a private Google search tool for businesses where you could have patched into those APIs for integrating new tools. Everything could have been searchable -- Slack, Email, Docs... everything. Isn't that what https://cloud.google.com/products/search/ https://cloud.google.com/products/search/ claims to do?

echelon 7y ago

> Google Cloud? Sorry... everyone's on AWS or Azure. Google Cloud was late to the party, but they were very smart to invest in GPUs near edge nodes. I think Stadia is primed to eat the gaming world's lunch. They can reuse this capacity for ML during off-peak hours. I'm actually kind of scared of Stadia. I like having physical copies of console games, and if Google makes major inroads they could become the dominant player in the gaming industry. They definitely won't be friendly to physical form factors.

mark_l_watson 7y ago
I have bought a lot of virtual content on Google Play Movies and Books. I am not nervous at all about that content going away. I imagine it is not quite the same for games which might require maintenance like security updates. Still, old versions of their games should be available.
reificator 7y ago
I'm a huge fan of digitally purchased games. By purchased I mean games with no DRM that don't require a multiplayer server or anything. Humble Bundle and GoG are good sources for these, but you can find them on Steam and such as well. On the flip side, physical games are no longer truly self contained. Day one patches and license keys and DRM and server shutdowns all prevent you from owning the content on the disk any more than a digital purchase. Now if only I still had time to play games...
- sombremesa 7y ago
  The person you're replying to specifically mentioned console games. Consoles have a (very) capacity (given the size of the average game), there are benefits to having physical copies of the games rather than digital.
  - reificator 7y ago
    Most consoles that allow for downloading games have an option for external storage. My switch has a 256 or 512 gig SD card. Xbox and Playstation allow for USB hard drives.

dcolkitt 7y ago

Chrome, Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Golang, AngularJS, Prometheus, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, Vitess, Spanner, Flutter, Bazel, GoogleTest, Istio, V8, AlphaZero Seems like Google innovates and builds a ton. It's the whole dealing with customers part that they don't like.

aesthethiccs 7y ago
Angularjs + Angular doesn't belong in that list. how they handled that transition gave react a huge footing, splintered the framework community, also have made it very hard to search for their own framework.
- andrewstuart 7y ago
  Wasn't the bigger problem that it was hard and heavyweight and felt like you needed to be a Java developing software engineer to make anything substantial with AngularJS?
- ErikAugust 7y ago
  Well, AngularJS shouldn't belong on that list because it was brought in from an acquisition, I believe.
jjtheblunt 7y ago
Isn't Golang really Bell Labs guys, now Google. MapReduce far far predates Google, in shared-memory multiprocessors of the late 80s and thereafter, for instance, though didn't Google popularize it.
- dagw 7y ago
  Isn't Golang really Bell Labs guys, now Google. Golang was developed at Google, with Googles blessing, by Google employees. I don't know how much more you can ask for. What difference does it make that some of the people had jobs before Google. MapReduce far far predates Google The general concept was known, the implementation and algorithms Google used to run MapReduce efficiently on large cluster of heterogeneous machines was original to Google.

finolex1 7y ago

I don't think it's half as bad as that. Google Flights, Translate, the G-Suite, Firebase and TensorFlow have all been good products/software, though perhaps not world-changing.

ianai 7y ago
Translate has been around as long as I can remember. It works exactly how I remember translate.altavista.com working-except I can’t remember whether alta vista could detect language.
- topmonk 7y ago
  The Google Translate android app has a magic camera that recognizes translates and replaces the text in real time in the video feed. That's pretty cool.
  - Crosseye_Jack 7y ago
    So does Google Translate on iPhone. But that was originally Word Lens, then google brought them and for a time the lens app became free then they added the functionality to the Google Translate app.
- rerx 7y ago
  There has been a staggering amount of innovation in machine translation. Google has some of the leading groups in research for neural machine translation and they put a lot of it into production. Saying that it works just like Altavista's Bablefish of yore is ridiculous, at least for the European languages I am familiar with. Translation quality as offered by all major services is leagues ahead compared to the state of, say, three years ago. (Disclaimer: I work on a competitor to Google Translate)
  - ianai 7y ago
    I meant UI...copy paste text on left side and output on right side. Of course there’s been innovation underneath. My comment wouldn't be two sentences if I had any knowledge about how alta vista or google translate work(ed) underneath.

shafyy 7y ago

What about Gmail and Maps? Anyhow, acquiring the right companies, integrating them successfully and keeping them successful is an equally important skill for a big corp. Look at FB, where would they be without being excellent at acquiring companies (IG, WhatsApp, Oculus). Edit: Can't spell

andromeduck 7y ago
Well inbox was a brewth of fresh air but apparently if you can't get a billion users of a billion bucks in a year or two it's just not worth doing.
bigiain 7y ago
Interestingly, the Google Wave team was lead by the founders of Where2 - the company they acquired and turned into Google Maps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_developer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_devel...
Causality1 7y ago
The only way Google actually commits to a product is if it becomes so popular so fast that killing it would rock society as we know it. Gmail, YouTube, Maps, etc.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

Thanks for mentioning Google Buzz. I had forgotten about that. Google published a sample AppEngine project that was very hackable and used the Buzz data stream. Nice, but now it is gone.

cryptoz 7y ago
Buzz's effect is still very much alive in production Google code. Gmail specifically bans you from using a label called 'buzz' due to this product bungle. Like 1B+ people plus are loading code today that references Buzz still, it's crazy. Edit: Screenshot https://imgur.com/a/ERuEwuo https://imgur.com/a/ERuEwuo

misiti3780 7y ago

all the greats of history create a lot of duds. Michelangelo threw away (and didn't finish) 75% of his works. many more examples in history.

ewoodrich 7y ago

> Android? Good luck getting an app in the app store without Google accidentally killing your company. Kinda painting with a broad brush about the world's most popular operating system with an 85% mobile marketshare. >Search? Nope... Elasticsearch now dominates that space. Again, being really selective here ignoring the virtual monopoly on consumer search.

Yeroc 7y ago
Android was actually a Google acquisition as well...
- icebraining 7y ago
  More of an acquihire. Even the version they showed in 2007 (two years after the acquisition) bared little resemblance with what it became.
  - keedon 7y ago
    Isn't the change mainly due to the iPhone being released? Before that it was a copy of the blackberry look & feel

DangitBobby 7y ago

I've only dabbled a bit in Azure and AWS, so I can't do much of a direct comparison, but GCP really seems to have its shit together in a major way. It has a high degree of polish and usability.

bigiain 7y ago

This isn't "google owning" their failures, but this: https://gcemetery.co https://gcemetery.co at least memorialises them...

ukyrgf 7y ago
It's funny that there are multiple takes on this: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

dragonwriter 7y ago

> Google needs to own its failures. It can't ship anything new or innovative. K8s? BigQuery? Chrome (in particular v8)? > Wave? dead. Wasn't Wave effectively a tech preview for collaboration technology central to Docs and Sheets? Whether or not that's the case, aren't Docs and Sheets counterexamples to your argument? > Google Cloud? Sorry... everyone's on AWS or Azure. AWS and Azure have together (as of Q4 2018) a bit less than 50% of the public cloud market, hardly “everyone”. Proportionately, Google is closer to Azure than Azure is to AWS, and has a higher growth rate than any of the other major public clouds, bigger or smaller. [0] AWS has first mover advantage, Azure has leveraging Microsoft’s preexisting deep penetration into enterprise. But Google's gaining on them, anyway. [0] https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cloud-market-share-q4-2018-and-full-year-2018 https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cloud-market-share-q4-2018-...

michaelt 7y ago
Wasn't Wave effectively a tech preview for collaboration technology central to Docs and Sheets? According to Wikipedia, Docs launched in March 2006 and Wave in May 2009. And Docs had collaborative editing from the start (Google brought it from a startup with that feature already working)
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  Right, but Wave was the foundation for the real-time conversations and other collaboration improvements added to Google Docs (etc.) during the period at the end of Wave’s life as an independent project at Google. https://lifehacker.com/google-docs-updates-with-a-drawing-editor-real-time-co-5513760 https://lifehacker.com/google-docs-updates-with-a-drawing-ed...
  - michaelt 7y ago
    But Docs had the ability for multiple people to concurrently edit a document and see one another's changes [1] before Wave was even launched - right? Hasn't live multi-user editing been there all along? [1] https://youtu.be/dSGkzDgW1fA?t=78 https://youtu.be/dSGkzDgW1fA?t=78

cnaut 7y ago

Google Photos and Google Maps are underrated in terms of future potential for Google's business

anchpop 7y ago
Google Photos by far is my favorite Google app. Whatever team works on that should be in charge of everything at Google.

mola 7y ago

Yeah, it's a shame. They were a really exciting company when they were about creating good products and not just about making us the product. Search was a game changer. Gmail was an amazing product compare to the incumbents at the time. It really felt as if product was king, with tech following closely. Now it feels like it's more about MBA type managers that care much more about the bottom line than about the product and customer. I think that Milton Friedman spiel about giving Shareholder value as the main objective of a manager, as opposed to giving value to customers, has done major damage to humanity, and the capitalist system.

krasicki 7y ago

The developer community needs to acknowledge Google's successes and contributions. I seem to remember that (maybe Facebook) had its WAVE development team recruited away. The Chrome browser and Chromebooks are non-trivial examples of Google's successes. WAVE was genius and needed time and feedback loops to mature. I morn early Polymer more than WAVE. Spot on brilliant. But yes, Google is this generation's Digital Equipment Corp. - engineering brilliance/marketing ineptitude.