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Google tends to take on problems that have high technical complexity, potential wide user base and extremely low marginal cost per user and monetizable via ads.
by vinay_ys 4y ago
Google tends to take on problems that have high technical complexity, potential wide user base and extremely low marginal cost per user and monetizable via ads. And they detest manual/field operational work and don't have the institutional muscle to do fast incremental iterative product development. These are good predictors of what product of theirs will succeed vs fail.
Within high technical complexity space, they differ in significant ways with Apple or Tesla – they don't have organizational mechanisms to do deep vertically integrated problem solutioning. Even when they have academically much superior AI tech, their ability to productize those capabilities is slow and less effective due to how cross-organization collaboration works.
On the business side, they don't have a business team really. There's no MBAs scheming new pricing or bundling models nor are there people wanting to chase/beat market competitors. So, whenever they do SKU based pricing or subscription based pricing, they tend to get it less right than, say, Microsoft.
- h0l0cube 4y agoI agree with what you're saying, and I think you've said more accurately and with more detail, what I was trying to convey. Edit: One thing to add... Google's history of 'solving highly technical problems' has really been more around scaling infrastructure, with their notable successful products being Google search, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube - with Android being an exception that rule if you'd call that a 'product'. Maps and Google assistance have some technical aspects, but nothing really out of the grasp of a modern startup. Technical ability for SaaS companies isn't really the moat it used to be.