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The cynicism here boggles the mind. You can talk blue in the face about all the products they haven't killed that power the world and people will just shake the

by leoh 6y ago

The cynicism here boggles the mind. You can talk blue in the face about all the products they haven't killed that power the world and people will just shake their heads in dismay and walk away muttering about Google Reader.

OrangeMango 6y ago
Categorize Google's products into two buckets - "home grown" and "bought the company". Then it starts to make a lot more sense.
- Arelius 6y ago
  Hmm, I think I lack the insight to know what this means. Knowing that YouTube and Android were acquisitions, suggests that acquisitions may have more lasting potential, but I don't know enough about gmail, docs, maps, etc to know if any of them were home grown. And looking at the list of acquisitions don't really clarify anything, all of their successful products seem to have some amount of acquisitions involved, but it's unclear to me if they were all sourced from the company, or if they bought companies to bring in talent into an ongoing home grown environment.
acdha 6y ago
The problem is that they have killed or mismanaged (Talk/Hangouts/Duo/Allo/Meet, Nest) enough products without any executive suffering consequences that it’s not unreasonable to ask how committed they are to anything which doesn’t sell ads. It’d be different if there was new management but absent a correction the same pattern seems likely to repeat for anything which isn’t a cure product. For anything involving infrastructure, you need a much longer attention span than has been on display.
asdff 6y ago
It would be absurd if they killed everything, that wouldn't be a very long lived company. But it is clear that they readily walk away from products if the profit isn't there. It's fine when it's some dumb piece of software, but absolutely not OK when it means a section of a city imo. And here we are in the comments section of an article describing Google doing just that.

by leoh 6y ago

OrangeMango 6y ago

Categorize Google's products into two buckets - "home grown" and "bought the company". Then it starts to make a lot more sense.

Arelius 6y ago
Hmm, I think I lack the insight to know what this means. Knowing that YouTube and Android were acquisitions, suggests that acquisitions may have more lasting potential, but I don't know enough about gmail, docs, maps, etc to know if any of them were home grown. And looking at the list of acquisitions don't really clarify anything, all of their successful products seem to have some amount of acquisitions involved, but it's unclear to me if they were all sourced from the company, or if they bought companies to bring in talent into an ongoing home grown environment.

acdha 6y ago

The problem is that they have killed or mismanaged (Talk/Hangouts/Duo/Allo/Meet, Nest) enough products without any executive suffering consequences that it’s not unreasonable to ask how committed they are to anything which doesn’t sell ads. It’d be different if there was new management but absent a correction the same pattern seems likely to repeat for anything which isn’t a cure product. For anything involving infrastructure, you need a much longer attention span than has been on display.

asdff 6y ago

It would be absurd if they killed everything, that wouldn't be a very long lived company. But it is clear that they readily walk away from products if the profit isn't there. It's fine when it's some dumb piece of software, but absolutely not OK when it means a section of a city imo. And here we are in the comments section of an article describing Google doing just that.