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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 th

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.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    I think that was true years ago, but less so now. Google has clawed back a lot of the power and control they initially gave away in order to gain partners. Things like moving functionality into Google Play Services give them the ability to do things without making an agreement with partners, and tightening requirements for passing conformance testing means they get to dictate even more as to what being an "Android device" means. Their Pixel line hasn't dominated the market by any means, but has also done well enough that they can at least claim to some extent that they don't "need" the other manufacturers. Of course they do, but they can use "whatever, we'll just make $COOL_THING a Pixel exclusive and leave you behind" a threat with teeth. They actually do sometimes make features Pixel exclusive (sometimes just for a limited time), and that seems to be working out ok for them. Similarly, Apple made a lot of concessions to the wireless carriers back in the beginning, but I'd wager these days they've also clawed back most of that control. If Apple tells their customers, "we wanted to give you this cool new feature, but Verizon wouldn't let us", that will not go well for Verizon. So I do agree that there's some compromise, and Google (and Apple) don't get to do literally anything they want, they are in a much better position to control their ecosystems and dictate terms than they were back when they started.
    - microtherion 4y ago
      > Similarly, Apple made a lot of concessions to the wireless carriers back in the beginning What concessions would those have been? The way I recall it, Apple in the early iPhone years would always favor retaining control over the phone experience over carrier reach, so they were available on very few carriers initially (especially compared to Android), but would not make concessions to them. Eventually, iPhones became a must-have item for carriers, so they all signed on under Apple's terms — and nowadays, unlocked phones are mostly the norm anyway.
- chx 4y ago
  While certainly Apple has innovated on things, you can't name anything which was not a gradual improvement but, as you say, a device that didn't exist yet. The first phone with a capacitive touch screen was the LG Prada. Of course, resistive touch screen phones existed for a long, long time before that. Sony Ericsson Liveview, MOTOACTV, the Pebble watch, even the Samsung Galaxy Gear predates the Apple Watch. As always, downvotes are welcome but where I am wrong?
  - nottorp 4y ago
    You're not wrong but you're simply describing Apple's business model. Take technology that has matured and do it well. If you ask me, Apple's main innovation with the iPhone was making the UI usable with just a finger instead of a stylus.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      There were a lot of naysayers at the time around doing away with a physical keyboard led by all the Blackberry speed thumb typists. The criticisms weren't even wrong per se but they ultimately didn't win out against the tradeoffs--which were certainly aided by the maligned but very necessary aggressive autocorrect.
      - treis 4y ago
        The first iPhone kind of sucked compared to the blackberrys of the day. They didn't even have copy and paste. It took a few iterations before the potential was unlocked.
        ghaff 4y ago
        I had a Treo and didn't switch to an iPhone until the 3GS. A lot of people remember the iPhone (and iPod) as these overnight successes--and they really weren't although they sold well enough. It was around the third or fourth generation that both really hit their stride. (As I recall iTunes didn't even run on Windows at first and Macs were systems used mostly by media professionals.)
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  > Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. I’m confused by your comment. Android pioneered a good 80% of the modern smartphone UX. Apple makes nice phones but they are pretty much always late mover.
  - hedgehog 4y ago
    What did Android pioneer? Android started life as a Blackberry clone, iOS appeared inspired by Newton, PalmOS, and ideas from FingerWorks and others. Android of course pivoted to copy the iPhone after it was announced. A lot of good ideas that later showed up in both were in Palm's WebOS first. Hard to see 80%.
- gilbetron 4y ago
  You have it backwards. Except for the very first iphone, largely Apple steals from UX, technologies, and form from the Android ecosystem. Apple is great at polishing ideas, but not so great at launching new ones entirely. They do have a few, but not many. Most of their "advances" can be traced back to non-Apple ecosystems. Apple has a closed ecosystem that they control completely, which I why I (and many Android users) hate. They stand on the shoulders of open systems like Android and watch for innovation that has merit, pluck it out, polish, and deliver it as their own, then gain the bulk of the reward. I see them as largely parasitic. Hell, they even claim reliability claims for OS X while standing on the back of unix.
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.

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.
- kelnos 4y ago
  I think that was true years ago, but less so now. Google has clawed back a lot of the power and control they initially gave away in order to gain partners. Things like moving functionality into Google Play Services give them the ability to do things without making an agreement with partners, and tightening requirements for passing conformance testing means they get to dictate even more as to what being an "Android device" means. Their Pixel line hasn't dominated the market by any means, but has also done well enough that they can at least claim to some extent that they don't "need" the other manufacturers. Of course they do, but they can use "whatever, we'll just make $COOL_THING a Pixel exclusive and leave you behind" a threat with teeth. They actually do sometimes make features Pixel exclusive (sometimes just for a limited time), and that seems to be working out ok for them. Similarly, Apple made a lot of concessions to the wireless carriers back in the beginning, but I'd wager these days they've also clawed back most of that control. If Apple tells their customers, "we wanted to give you this cool new feature, but Verizon wouldn't let us", that will not go well for Verizon. So I do agree that there's some compromise, and Google (and Apple) don't get to do literally anything they want, they are in a much better position to control their ecosystems and dictate terms than they were back when they started.
  - microtherion 4y ago
    > Similarly, Apple made a lot of concessions to the wireless carriers back in the beginning What concessions would those have been? The way I recall it, Apple in the early iPhone years would always favor retaining control over the phone experience over carrier reach, so they were available on very few carriers initially (especially compared to Android), but would not make concessions to them. Eventually, iPhones became a must-have item for carriers, so they all signed on under Apple's terms — and nowadays, unlocked phones are mostly the norm anyway.
chx 4y ago
While certainly Apple has innovated on things, you can't name anything which was not a gradual improvement but, as you say, a device that didn't exist yet. The first phone with a capacitive touch screen was the LG Prada. Of course, resistive touch screen phones existed for a long, long time before that. Sony Ericsson Liveview, MOTOACTV, the Pebble watch, even the Samsung Galaxy Gear predates the Apple Watch. As always, downvotes are welcome but where I am wrong?
- nottorp 4y ago
  You're not wrong but you're simply describing Apple's business model. Take technology that has matured and do it well. If you ask me, Apple's main innovation with the iPhone was making the UI usable with just a finger instead of a stylus.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    There were a lot of naysayers at the time around doing away with a physical keyboard led by all the Blackberry speed thumb typists. The criticisms weren't even wrong per se but they ultimately didn't win out against the tradeoffs--which were certainly aided by the maligned but very necessary aggressive autocorrect.
    - treis 4y ago
      The first iPhone kind of sucked compared to the blackberrys of the day. They didn't even have copy and paste. It took a few iterations before the potential was unlocked.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        I had a Treo and didn't switch to an iPhone until the 3GS. A lot of people remember the iPhone (and iPod) as these overnight successes--and they really weren't although they sold well enough. It was around the third or fourth generation that both really hit their stride. (As I recall iTunes didn't even run on Windows at first and Macs were systems used mostly by media professionals.)
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
> Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. I’m confused by your comment. Android pioneered a good 80% of the modern smartphone UX. Apple makes nice phones but they are pretty much always late mover.
- hedgehog 4y ago
  What did Android pioneer? Android started life as a Blackberry clone, iOS appeared inspired by Newton, PalmOS, and ideas from FingerWorks and others. Android of course pivoted to copy the iPhone after it was announced. A lot of good ideas that later showed up in both were in Palm's WebOS first. Hard to see 80%.
gilbetron 4y ago
You have it backwards. Except for the very first iphone, largely Apple steals from UX, technologies, and form from the Android ecosystem. Apple is great at polishing ideas, but not so great at launching new ones entirely. They do have a few, but not many. Most of their "advances" can be traced back to non-Apple ecosystems. Apple has a closed ecosystem that they control completely, which I why I (and many Android users) hate. They stand on the shoulders of open systems like Android and watch for innovation that has merit, pluck it out, polish, and deliver it as their own, then gain the bulk of the reward. I see them as largely parasitic. Hell, they even claim reliability claims for OS X while standing on the back of unix.

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.