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Has it actually served them well? How many of Google’s controversial launches have turned out well? The YouTube acquisition was risky but that was more on the c

• shadowgovt 4y ago
  > Has it actually served them well? I feel like I can just gesture to the stock price and say "scoreboard," but that seems an unfair dismissal of the question. To expound on the topic a bit: I think when they were a smaller company it served them well consistently. Photos and Drive have become an enterprise cornerstone that supports their "light cloud" business space (quite a few people pay for that extra storage). Ads doesn't get talked about much, but the internal culture is very quick-innovate. Chrome went from being a wild idea to dominating the browser-share (and therefore giving Google a foot in the door on everyone's desktop computer), and then they parlayed that into a whole operating system play. Maps basically displaced most of the other players in that space and now competes with only a couple other contenders. I don't know if it will continue to do so now that they're an 800-lb gorilla in the room. They've certainly become more structurally conservative in the decade-plus since their founding. And I think their push into Cloud is putting pressure on them to act a lot more starched-collar; Enterprise is a different customer than they're used to (or comfortable with) dealing with.