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> As a gamer, I think Stadia failed because the system they created doesn't make sense. Google, Facebook, etc. are victims of early success. They made their b

> As a gamer, I think Stadia failed because the system they created doesn't make sense. Google, Facebook, etc. are victims of early success. They made their billions on low hanging fruit, by throwing a lot of resources at problems with very high demand for a solution that weren't yet tackled well (e.g. query the internet, keep in touch with friends). So it's no wonder that in this day in age they are incapable of understanding product market fit, innovating, or competing in a market with competent players and a lower barrier to entry.

stingraycharles 4y ago
At least for Google, I don’t think you can call what they did with search low hanging fruit. Their solution was anything but, and it was truly innovative (at the time) and their success was well deserved. I do agree that they’re victims of their early success, but rather that it proves that it’s rather difficult to make multiple successful products. When you own a whole ecosystem, like Microsoft and Apple do, it makes it much easier to do; you can also see this in case of Google Maps. You can just push your products inside the ecosystem, and be almost guaranteed success. Stadia drifted away from that ecosystem (as does Google Cloud for that matter), and as such is much more difficult to pull off. Combine that with Google’s reputation for killing things, and the writing was on the wall from the start.
- x0x0 4y ago
  I think the point is that Google nailed search so well -- and the $ chased eyes -- that they never really had to learn to build products that aren't constructed in the face of early, overwhelming demand. All the hard work of listening to customers, listening to prospects, teaching them that they should want the thing you built or are going to build, accepting feedback, etc.
- h0l0cube 4y ago
  > When you own a whole ecosystem Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. A distinction can be drawn with Apple here, as they've opened new markets by making devices that didn't exist yet (e.g., touch-driven mobile computing). They innovated from the beginning, not so much remaking Altavista with Bigtable.
  - vxNsr 4y ago
    This is such a great point. Google has been coasting on android for years now, pixel has some cool phone features (call transcription, navigating phone trees) but those aren’t shared to the wider android market and virtually everything else comes down to, let’s make a better camera. The whole reason they created android was to prevent Microsoft from winning the mobile space. Making sure the other guy loses isn’t great motivation to do anything. Especially once the “other guy” has lost. Google isn’t especially excited by OS, because their bread and butter is all in the cloud they just don’t have the institutional energy to care about consumer software for the consumer’s sake. It’s always looked at through the lens of how it will help advertisers and since the zeitgeist for the last few years has been about privacy as it relates to personal devices, they can’t really “innovate” much without hurting their core business.
    - kelnos 4y ago
      This is also such a great point. I've never considered Google's lazy attitude toward Android through the lens of why Android became a priority in the first place. That really does explain a lot. And the rest of it: "Ok, we killed Microsoft here, now what?" "Eh... whatever."
    - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      > just don’t have the institutional energy to care about consumer software for the consumer’s sake I worked in Google consumer hardware and yes this is how it is. Quite a few motivated and talented people, for sure, but organizationally it just ended up being "copy Apple and/or Amazon's roadmap." There are whole product areas at Google whose entire existence boils down to "everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?"
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    With android they had to get buy in from phones makers and other powerful parties. To do this they had to give up quite a bit of power and control. They never owned the ecosystem in nearly the same way. It was always a compromise.
- narrator 4y ago
  Larry and Sergei decided they are not interested in the business anymore. That's probably why Google has failed to innovate much lately. How great would Tesla or SpaceX be without Elon? Companies without the founders become too cautious and status quo oriented.
  - vxNsr 4y ago
    It’s pretty interesting actually you can see exactly where Elon is focusing based on what’s going on at each company. The fact that Tesla has failed to output a new car or really innovate much lately, and spacex appears to be stuck in a morass of engine troubles for their latest big rockets, tells you how much he’s taken his eye off the ball.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      I'm sorry but this is just outright wrong. > The fact that Tesla has failed to output a new car or really innovate much lately They literally turned into a battery company with their own batteries, their own chemistry and their own end to end manufacturing process. They are making state of the art batteries when only 5 years ago this company had never even made single high volume car. You can like or dislike FSD but it is innovative. In terms of manufacturing, things like Gigapress is now getting copied all over the car industry. Innovation is not just new products. And in capital intensive business, scale itself requires innovation. And they are doing this while having 30% growth every year with exploding profits at the same time. After 10 years when people were screaming about how EV wouldn't ever be profitable. > spacex appears to be stuck in a morass of engine troubles for their latest big rockets What? SpaceX is currently reaching an incredibly high operational cadence. That requires innovation. SpaceX is launching Starlink sats with laser communication and deploying it large scale. They are producing incredibly advanced antenna technology as consumer electronics. The Raptor engine is the most advanced rocket engine in human history and they are on their second major iteration building them as fast as very few rocket engine in history have ever been produced. They are regularly doing full duration test of these engines. Currently its not really the engines that is holding them back. Claiming that being a little bit late on building the by far the most advanced rocket system in human history is taking his eye of the ball is pretty absurd.
- choppaface 4y ago
  Search was full of low-hanging fruit. TF-IDF was well-known. PageRank less so but when the nascent internet has so much signal-to-noise it’s often hard to go wrong. Execution was key—- especially compute efficiency—- but a lot of those are nerdy problems detached from real people. Which is wear Google does well. Stadia was a rich technical problem with an application area that’s accessible to Googlers. Even if Googlers don’t video game, real life is a game to them. But Stadia failed because it lacked the artistic passion behind Nintendo and the best gaming studios. If Google set themselves up like McKinsey—- i.e. turn their engineering workforce into a contracting service—- then Google might be able to contribute to a real product. But Googlers just don’t care about people. They care about puzzles and systematicity.
  - int0x2e 4y ago
    Google is known for launching and then soon killing its projects, and game platforms are built on long term trust and momentum. That's why Stadia never got the momentum it needed.
  - mrkramer 4y ago
    >Search was full of low-hanging fruit. TF-IDF was well-known. PageRank less so but when the nascent internet has so much signal-to-noise it’s often hard to go wrong. PageRank actually originates from Economics[0] where Input–output model tells you that you need to care about balancing inputs and outputs in order to have an efficient economy. Speaking of internet search engines and ranking websites inputs would be links(backlinks) and outputs would be ranked web documents. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_model
- chongli 4y ago
  Their solution was anything but, and it was truly innovative (at the time) and their success was well deserved. It was totally low hanging fruit. Try building a search engine today. The barriers to entry are much harder. Finding useful sites and filtering out spam are much more difficult now than when Google started. The signal to noise ratio on the internet has plummeted. And that is just the difficulty of building an application. Actually gaining marketshare in search is a whole other problem to solve and also very difficult. Even if you manage to build a superior search engine you’ll have an uphill battle convincing people to use it. This is what it means to have all the low hanging fruit cleaned out. Google built their application at a time when most people weren’t even on the internet and spam was barely getting started as a social problem. Sure, what they had was remarkable and innovative, but only because everything else at the time was so bad. But now? Different story. You can actually read Page & Brin’s original paper online [1] and implement it yourself. It’s not very difficult. In fact, it was an assignment question in my 3rd year numerical methods class. Unfortunately if you just point the basic algorithm at a crawl (which you can download for free here [2]) you’re going to get useless results. The spammers are optimized to fool this algorithm (Pagerank) so you need to find a way to filter out the spam. And that is a very very deep rabbit hole! [1] https://research.google/pubs/pub334/ https://research.google/pubs/pub334/ [2] https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/
  - wanderlust123 4y ago
    Do you have a link to that numerical methods class? Sounds really interesting
    - isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
      Power iteration of Google matrix is the concept to look up. They reduced the PageRank problem to a well known linear algebra problem with a lot of efficient libraries.
  - KajMagnus 4y ago
    > implement it yourself. It’s not very difficult But that's not where others failed. Instead, it's coming up with the idea, realizing that it's a truly good idea, that was the important thing. (Remember, Yahoo and other(s) didn't want to buy Google and the algorithm, when they had the chance.) Maybe if you replace "totally low hanging fruit", with "It was undiscovered winner-takes-it-all markets" I'd agree. In hindsight, everything is obvious. But initially, discovering that opportunity — looking at how many people (how few, just 2) did, it wasn't easy.
- tracerbulletx 4y ago
  Android should be their ecosystem and they aren't managing that nearly as well as they could be.
utopcell 4y ago
Low hanging fruit ? There were 10 search engines when Google launched, and a megalith called Yahoo dominating the Internet.
- h0l0cube 4y ago
  > problems with very high demand for a solution that weren't yet tackled well Emphasis added. It took putting the right money and the right minds towards doing it well. There aren't a lot of SaaS ideas that scale to close to 100% of world population that don't yet have an incumbent. Tiktok was lucky that Twitter dumped Vine. Zoom was lucky that Skype, Hangouts, Facetime dropped the ball by trying to keep their users in walled gardens, and not really solving the teleconference problem well.
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  IMO Google was the first search engine to execute successfully, and that launched them to the stars. Building something that does the job on the label is one thing - building a good product is another. So they are big because they were there early. But being there early didn't guarantee you'd get big.
- ezconnect 4y ago
  There were no real search engine back then. Those sites were just curated list of websites. Google was the first one to crawl the whole web and made it possible to find them.
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    Uhh, no, Altavista was the dominant player before Google and it had plenty of competition. Google's key innovations were leveraging PageRank to extract signal from what other webpages were saying, instead of relying on naive keyword search etc, and then figuring out a way to monetize search with targeted keyword ads when Yahoo and co were stuck with banner impressions.
    - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
jrockway 4y ago
I don't think people at Google have a problem innovating or understanding product/market fit. Rather, they have 100,000 employees (think about that for a second, how long it would take to count that many people), and not everyone's project is a good idea. That doesn't mean people don't try hard, it just means that there isn't necessarily a business just because they want there to be. I think the problem is simply that it's too disorganized with that many people. I used to work on Google Fiber, and something that our customers complained about was that they couldn't upload files to Google Drive at 1Gbps. That wasn't our fault, we were happy to route data at that speed, and we had the peering capacity with Google to support it. (Different ASNs!) The reality was, we identified performance problems with Google Drive, and they simply didn't care. They had other stuff to worry about; only one city in the US had 1Gbps Internet at the time, but they still didn't have 100% of the docs/file sharing market (hi Dropbox), so they were like "it's not a priority" and worked on something that would actually make them money instead. I get it, but it never felt good. That's what's sad about companies with such a large scope; supporting your own company's initiative is rarely the right business. The reason I like small companies is because if there was jrockway Fiber and jrockway Drive, obviously they would work perfectly together. I would simply not sleep a few nights to make it happen. But at big companies, that's not a thing, and it really confuses people that imagine the brand name means something. (I have similar complaints about calling shitty Android tablets "Chromebooks", when they didn't run Chrome OS. The Chrome OS team was a level above Android in terms of technical excellence, so it just felt bad to have some bug-ridden third-party tablet ruin the brand name like that. But, money. I'm sure people bought them, hated them, and still use Chrome instead of Firefox. But it always makes me a little sad.)
- Closi 4y ago
  I think Apple shows that it’s not really an inevitable problem with scale - they largely make products that stick around and are well integrated with each other while being huge in scale and scope. IMO from the outside the problem with Google seems to be a lack of saying ‘no’ to people - they start so many different offerings without enough/any cohesion, bring stuff to market quite fast, then seemingly strip resources away as soon as they have gone live if the product isn’t instantly an overnight success.
indymike 4y ago
> Google, Facebook, etc. are victims of early success. This is accurate. What makes a company good a defending market leadership makes them terrible at innovation - and you see this with both Google and Meta as they churn though building 100 million dollar products only to discontinue them because they aren't worth billions yet.
smrtinsert 4y ago
Facebook wasn't early. Social networks had been going on for decades before them, and even the code around them is freely available these days. They had a harvard.edu gimmick and it paid off. Facebook was advertising.

stingraycharles 4y ago

At least for Google, I don’t think you can call what they did with search low hanging fruit. Their solution was anything but, and it was truly innovative (at the time) and their success was well deserved. I do agree that they’re victims of their early success, but rather that it proves that it’s rather difficult to make multiple successful products. When you own a whole ecosystem, like Microsoft and Apple do, it makes it much easier to do; you can also see this in case of Google Maps. You can just push your products inside the ecosystem, and be almost guaranteed success. Stadia drifted away from that ecosystem (as does Google Cloud for that matter), and as such is much more difficult to pull off. Combine that with Google’s reputation for killing things, and the writing was on the wall from the start.

x0x0 4y ago
I think the point is that Google nailed search so well -- and the $ chased eyes -- that they never really had to learn to build products that aren't constructed in the face of early, overwhelming demand. All the hard work of listening to customers, listening to prospects, teaching them that they should want the thing you built or are going to build, accepting feedback, etc.
h0l0cube 4y ago
> When you own a whole ecosystem Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. A distinction can be drawn with Apple here, as they've opened new markets by making devices that didn't exist yet (e.g., touch-driven mobile computing). They innovated from the beginning, not so much remaking Altavista with Bigtable.
- vxNsr 4y ago
  This is such a great point. Google has been coasting on android for years now, pixel has some cool phone features (call transcription, navigating phone trees) but those aren’t shared to the wider android market and virtually everything else comes down to, let’s make a better camera. The whole reason they created android was to prevent Microsoft from winning the mobile space. Making sure the other guy loses isn’t great motivation to do anything. Especially once the “other guy” has lost. Google isn’t especially excited by OS, because their bread and butter is all in the cloud they just don’t have the institutional energy to care about consumer software for the consumer’s sake. It’s always looked at through the lens of how it will help advertisers and since the zeitgeist for the last few years has been about privacy as it relates to personal devices, they can’t really “innovate” much without hurting their core business.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    This is also such a great point. I've never considered Google's lazy attitude toward Android through the lens of why Android became a priority in the first place. That really does explain a lot. And the rest of it: "Ok, we killed Microsoft here, now what?" "Eh... whatever."
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    > just don’t have the institutional energy to care about consumer software for the consumer’s sake I worked in Google consumer hardware and yes this is how it is. Quite a few motivated and talented people, for sure, but organizationally it just ended up being "copy Apple and/or Amazon's roadmap." There are whole product areas at Google whose entire existence boils down to "everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?"
- panick21_ 4y ago
  With android they had to get buy in from phones makers and other powerful parties. To do this they had to give up quite a bit of power and control. They never owned the ecosystem in nearly the same way. It was always a compromise.
narrator 4y ago
Larry and Sergei decided they are not interested in the business anymore. That's probably why Google has failed to innovate much lately. How great would Tesla or SpaceX be without Elon? Companies without the founders become too cautious and status quo oriented.
- vxNsr 4y ago
  It’s pretty interesting actually you can see exactly where Elon is focusing based on what’s going on at each company. The fact that Tesla has failed to output a new car or really innovate much lately, and spacex appears to be stuck in a morass of engine troubles for their latest big rockets, tells you how much he’s taken his eye off the ball.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    I'm sorry but this is just outright wrong. > The fact that Tesla has failed to output a new car or really innovate much lately They literally turned into a battery company with their own batteries, their own chemistry and their own end to end manufacturing process. They are making state of the art batteries when only 5 years ago this company had never even made single high volume car. You can like or dislike FSD but it is innovative. In terms of manufacturing, things like Gigapress is now getting copied all over the car industry. Innovation is not just new products. And in capital intensive business, scale itself requires innovation. And they are doing this while having 30% growth every year with exploding profits at the same time. After 10 years when people were screaming about how EV wouldn't ever be profitable. > spacex appears to be stuck in a morass of engine troubles for their latest big rockets What? SpaceX is currently reaching an incredibly high operational cadence. That requires innovation. SpaceX is launching Starlink sats with laser communication and deploying it large scale. They are producing incredibly advanced antenna technology as consumer electronics. The Raptor engine is the most advanced rocket engine in human history and they are on their second major iteration building them as fast as very few rocket engine in history have ever been produced. They are regularly doing full duration test of these engines. Currently its not really the engines that is holding them back. Claiming that being a little bit late on building the by far the most advanced rocket system in human history is taking his eye of the ball is pretty absurd.
choppaface 4y ago
Search was full of low-hanging fruit. TF-IDF was well-known. PageRank less so but when the nascent internet has so much signal-to-noise it’s often hard to go wrong. Execution was key—- especially compute efficiency—- but a lot of those are nerdy problems detached from real people. Which is wear Google does well. Stadia was a rich technical problem with an application area that’s accessible to Googlers. Even if Googlers don’t video game, real life is a game to them. But Stadia failed because it lacked the artistic passion behind Nintendo and the best gaming studios. If Google set themselves up like McKinsey—- i.e. turn their engineering workforce into a contracting service—- then Google might be able to contribute to a real product. But Googlers just don’t care about people. They care about puzzles and systematicity.
- int0x2e 4y ago
  Google is known for launching and then soon killing its projects, and game platforms are built on long term trust and momentum. That's why Stadia never got the momentum it needed.
- mrkramer 4y ago
  >Search was full of low-hanging fruit. TF-IDF was well-known. PageRank less so but when the nascent internet has so much signal-to-noise it’s often hard to go wrong. PageRank actually originates from Economics[0] where Input–output model tells you that you need to care about balancing inputs and outputs in order to have an efficient economy. Speaking of internet search engines and ranking websites inputs would be links(backlinks) and outputs would be ranked web documents. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_model
chongli 4y ago
Their solution was anything but, and it was truly innovative (at the time) and their success was well deserved. It was totally low hanging fruit. Try building a search engine today. The barriers to entry are much harder. Finding useful sites and filtering out spam are much more difficult now than when Google started. The signal to noise ratio on the internet has plummeted. And that is just the difficulty of building an application. Actually gaining marketshare in search is a whole other problem to solve and also very difficult. Even if you manage to build a superior search engine you’ll have an uphill battle convincing people to use it. This is what it means to have all the low hanging fruit cleaned out. Google built their application at a time when most people weren’t even on the internet and spam was barely getting started as a social problem. Sure, what they had was remarkable and innovative, but only because everything else at the time was so bad. But now? Different story. You can actually read Page & Brin’s original paper online [1] and implement it yourself. It’s not very difficult. In fact, it was an assignment question in my 3rd year numerical methods class. Unfortunately if you just point the basic algorithm at a crawl (which you can download for free here [2]) you’re going to get useless results. The spammers are optimized to fool this algorithm (Pagerank) so you need to find a way to filter out the spam. And that is a very very deep rabbit hole! [1] https://research.google/pubs/pub334/ https://research.google/pubs/pub334/ [2] https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/
- wanderlust123 4y ago
  Do you have a link to that numerical methods class? Sounds really interesting
  - isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
    Power iteration of Google matrix is the concept to look up. They reduced the PageRank problem to a well known linear algebra problem with a lot of efficient libraries.
- KajMagnus 4y ago
  > implement it yourself. It’s not very difficult But that's not where others failed. Instead, it's coming up with the idea, realizing that it's a truly good idea, that was the important thing. (Remember, Yahoo and other(s) didn't want to buy Google and the algorithm, when they had the chance.) Maybe if you replace "totally low hanging fruit", with "It was undiscovered winner-takes-it-all markets" I'd agree. In hindsight, everything is obvious. But initially, discovering that opportunity — looking at how many people (how few, just 2) did, it wasn't easy.
tracerbulletx 4y ago
Android should be their ecosystem and they aren't managing that nearly as well as they could be.

utopcell 4y ago

Low hanging fruit ? There were 10 search engines when Google launched, and a megalith called Yahoo dominating the Internet.

h0l0cube 4y ago
> problems with very high demand for a solution that weren't yet tackled well Emphasis added. It took putting the right money and the right minds towards doing it well. There aren't a lot of SaaS ideas that scale to close to 100% of world population that don't yet have an incumbent. Tiktok was lucky that Twitter dumped Vine. Zoom was lucky that Skype, Hangouts, Facetime dropped the ball by trying to keep their users in walled gardens, and not really solving the teleconference problem well.
teaearlgraycold 4y ago
IMO Google was the first search engine to execute successfully, and that launched them to the stars. Building something that does the job on the label is one thing - building a good product is another. So they are big because they were there early. But being there early didn't guarantee you'd get big.
ezconnect 4y ago
There were no real search engine back then. Those sites were just curated list of websites. Google was the first one to crawl the whole web and made it possible to find them.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Uhh, no, Altavista was the dominant player before Google and it had plenty of competition. Google's key innovations were leveraging PageRank to extract signal from what other webpages were saying, instead of relying on naive keyword search etc, and then figuring out a way to monetize search with targeted keyword ads when Yahoo and co were stuck with banner impressions.
  - MattPalmer1086 4y ago

jrockway 4y ago

I don't think people at Google have a problem innovating or understanding product/market fit. Rather, they have 100,000 employees (think about that for a second, how long it would take to count that many people), and not everyone's project is a good idea. That doesn't mean people don't try hard, it just means that there isn't necessarily a business just because they want there to be. I think the problem is simply that it's too disorganized with that many people. I used to work on Google Fiber, and something that our customers complained about was that they couldn't upload files to Google Drive at 1Gbps. That wasn't our fault, we were happy to route data at that speed, and we had the peering capacity with Google to support it. (Different ASNs!) The reality was, we identified performance problems with Google Drive, and they simply didn't care. They had other stuff to worry about; only one city in the US had 1Gbps Internet at the time, but they still didn't have 100% of the docs/file sharing market (hi Dropbox), so they were like "it's not a priority" and worked on something that would actually make them money instead. I get it, but it never felt good. That's what's sad about companies with such a large scope; supporting your own company's initiative is rarely the right business. The reason I like small companies is because if there was jrockway Fiber and jrockway Drive, obviously they would work perfectly together. I would simply not sleep a few nights to make it happen. But at big companies, that's not a thing, and it really confuses people that imagine the brand name means something. (I have similar complaints about calling shitty Android tablets "Chromebooks", when they didn't run Chrome OS. The Chrome OS team was a level above Android in terms of technical excellence, so it just felt bad to have some bug-ridden third-party tablet ruin the brand name like that. But, money. I'm sure people bought them, hated them, and still use Chrome instead of Firefox. But it always makes me a little sad.)

Closi 4y ago
I think Apple shows that it’s not really an inevitable problem with scale - they largely make products that stick around and are well integrated with each other while being huge in scale and scope. IMO from the outside the problem with Google seems to be a lack of saying ‘no’ to people - they start so many different offerings without enough/any cohesion, bring stuff to market quite fast, then seemingly strip resources away as soon as they have gone live if the product isn’t instantly an overnight success.

indymike 4y ago

> Google, Facebook, etc. are victims of early success. This is accurate. What makes a company good a defending market leadership makes them terrible at innovation - and you see this with both Google and Meta as they churn though building 100 million dollar products only to discontinue them because they aren't worth billions yet.

smrtinsert 4y ago

Facebook wasn't early. Social networks had been going on for decades before them, and even the code around them is freely available these days. They had a harvard.edu gimmick and it paid off. Facebook was advertising.